


Zootopian Eclipse

by Zarpaulus



Series: Zootopian Eclipse [1]
Category: Eclipse Phase, Zootopia (2016)
Genre: F/M, Science Fiction, Transformation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-12
Updated: 2018-06-16
Packaged: 2019-05-21 06:08:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 23,834
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14909816
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zarpaulus/pseuds/Zarpaulus
Summary: Your instinct is software. Program it!Your species is a sleeve. Change it!Death is a disease. Cure it!Extinction is approaching. Fight it!150 years ago, the discovery of ancient "cornucopia machines" made the dream of Zootopia possible. 30 years ago the machines yielded a new set of miracles, the limitations of species itself could be transcended. 10 years ago, they turned on mammalkind.





	1. Chapter 1

_ EyeWiki Archived Article: _

_ ZNN Online July 20th, 118: _

_ Shocking Discovery at Food Processing Plant _

 

_ Two days ago a pair of hackers employed by the Prosperity Group made an unforeseen breakthrough in cracking the source code of the Cornucopia Machines used to feed Zootopia’s wide variety of species.  As you know, these machines were discovered below the watering hole that our great city was built around over one hundred and eighteen years ago, enabling the interspecies peace that has held to this day.  Excepting the Night Howler crisis two years ago of course. However, our scientists have been unable to reverse-engineer their systems and duplicate them or figure out how to make them do more than convert one food source into another, until now. _

 

_ These hackers have been able to interface with a Cornucopia for the first time and discovered a wide menu of schematics stored within.  It seems, not only can these ancient devices turn a pile of grain and roots into nutritious protein paste for predators, they can also be programmed to convert nearly any form of matter into another state so long as it uses the same elements.  Thus far they have discovered blueprints for hundreds of different tools, pharmaceuticals, even weapons! But rest assured, Prosperity assures us at ZNN that they will refrain from releasing Cornucopia Machines to the consumer market until they find out how to lock or remove the weapons’ blueprints from the devices. _

 

_ Perhaps more shocking than these instruments of destruction, however, may be the discovery of blueprints for items that seem designed for insertion into mammal bodies.  The Cornucopia Machines apparently have directions for grafting such things as claws, pheromone glands, prehensile tails, and even fish-like gills onto any species. And then there are the implants of purposes we can only guess.  What could “Mesh Inserts,” “Cortical Stacks,” or “Medichines” do for mammalkind? We won’t know until someone volunteers to have them implanted. _

 

**< 1 They had no idea what was in store when they unlocked those things.**

**2 > It’s not like the Fall was the nanofabricators’ fault or anything you know.**

**< 1 Were they?  Those schematics included the early AI seed algorithms that led to the TITANs.**

**2 > If mammals hadn’t found that technological boost our grandkids would have developed them on their own.**

**< 1 I was thinking more about what if we’d never found them in the first place.**

**2 > You’d rather we still ate one another?  Never took you for a neo-prim.**

**< 1 Why do I even bother with these Autonomists?**

 

\---

 

_ March 4th, 140.  (Old) Zootopia, Planet Ark _

 

As her alarm went off Judy considered that she had preferred it when the dang thing was outside her head, before the Mesh Inserts.  She couldn’t even get the satisfaction of slapping the snooze button and getting an extra few minutes of sleep, as the virtual voice of her muse reminded her.

 

[Judy, it’s 5:00.]  Sky, the AI agent running on her Inserts noted.  [You know you should be getting ready for work now.]

 

“Let this old lady get her rest.”  The groggy bunny replied.

 

[You’re forty-eight years old, even before Biomods and Rejuvenation were discovered that wasn’t “old”.]

 

Judy sighed in defeat and swung out of bed to prepare for the day.  The smart-alecky algorithm was right, with her augmentations she was physically in no worse condition that when she was thirty, but mentally she felt old.  She was twice as old now as when she had first joined the ZPD, half her life as a cop, and just less than that in a completely different world it seemed now.  Many things she’d grown up taking for granted were no longer true. She thought she’d made waves when she seemingly proved that a mammal didn’t need to settle for what society thought their species was best suited for, but now people could bypass their body’s limitations with augmentation, or even get new ones and change species entirely, if they could afford it.  Now an entire generation had grown up in this strange new world now.

 

Her inserts pinged with an incoming message from the precinct.  She answered with annoyed voice only. “Yes, Ben?”

 

[Judy!]  Clawhauser’s mental voice was tinged with a heavy degree of desperation and fear.  [We need you here ASAP!]

 

“What is it?  More Biocon protests?  Or did we find where Weaselton is getting those bootleg pods?”

 

[Worse, much worse.  Chief wants you and Nick down her now so you can be briefed in person.]

 

Judy’s ears shot straight up in shock.  Chief Fangmeyer wasn’t normally as irritable as her predecessor.  What was going on to make her so concerned? “We’ll be there in ten minutes!”  She terminated the call and began to toss on her clothes, armor, and “Agonizer” crowd-control microwave pistol.  “Sky, call Nick and make sure he got the message too!”

 

[His muse is screening calls.]  The AI replied.

 

“Tell Jack it’s vitally important.  Use our priority code if you need to.”

[Sending.]  There was a moment’s pause before her muse continued.  [He is awake, Jack says he will inform him of the situation as soon as he gets down from the ceiling.]

 

“Just make sure he’s ready in five.”  Judy remarked, barreling down the stairs to her car.

\---

 

“Seriously Carrots?”  Her vulpine partner asked as he got into the passenger’s seat next to her.  “You wake me up, in that particular way, for reasons that you can’t even specify?”

 

Judy rolled her eyes as she pulled away.  “Nick, you know perfectly well that Fangmeyer wouldn’t call us in for no reason.  She probably didn’t want to discuss it over comms that could be tapped or something.”

 

The fox sighed and leaned back in the chair.  “Look, if something big is happening there’s no way it’s still a secret.  Somebody will have seen it and posted it to a dozen different social networks by now.”  Nick’s eyes rolled back as he retreated into the wireless Mesh in search of an answer. And then he shot forward in his seat with an undisguised expression of horror.  “We need to get to the armory, now!”

 

“Why?  What’s going on?”  Judy asked, surprised at his sudden turn of phrase.

 

“No time,” he replied.  “Tell me you have weapons with you.”  He yanked open the lockbox in the back seat and drew Judy’s Agonizer just as a strange drone came over the horizon.  It looked mostly like a standard cargo quadrotor, but it had what seemed like a jet engine bolted onto the rear end and two of its graspers ended in spinning disks.  Nick rolled down the window and aimed at the drone, microwaves causing the air to shimmer. The drone didn’t show any response to the Agonizer shots and began to swoop in on the car.  “Damnit!” Nick swore at the device in his hand, “Judy, I need you to give me permission for “roast” mode.”

 

[Sky, unlock my Agonizer’s safeties for Nick now.]  Judy mentally directed at her muse.

 

[I’m sorry,] the Muse seemed genuinely apologetic.  [It’s hardwired, you’ll need to touch the biometric sensor and input your passcode for Nick to use potentially lethal power levels.]

 

“Nick, I need you to hand that back to me quick.”  Judy said, holding out her hand.

 

“It’s right on top of us you dumb bunny!”  The fox shouted as he held the beam on the attacking drone.  “We don’t have time!”

 

“I need to unlock it so you can fry…” she trailed off as the drone slammed into the side of the car and wrenched her lithe partner out through the window.  Its’ prize snagged, the machine flew straight up, dripping blood as it went. There was the sickening sound of metal grinding on bone followed by a loud thump on the car’s roof.  Judy was frozen in place, unsure what to do, until a red-furred arm still holding her blunt-nosed pistol flopped over her window. Cautiously, she opened the door, pausing to take her Agonizer back and fully unlock it before stepping out and taking a look.  The optimistic glimmer she’d allowed herself fled at the sight of the headless carcass oozing its’ last vital fluids onto the paintwork.

\---

 

Later, Judy couldn’t say why she’d dragged Nick’s headless body into the passenger seat and belted it in.  Without a brain he couldn’t be revived, and the saws had cut low enough to take the cortical stack implanted at the base of his skull.  He might still be resleeved from his external backup, but ZPD policy prioritized witnesses and officers who could report on who or what killed them for resleeving first.  And without his stack he wouldn’t remember a thing that had happened since his last backup, whenever that might have been.

 

Regardless, she found herself driving at a breakneck pace through the streets of Zootopia with a corpse sitting next to her.  As Judy rounded the last corner she spotted the mob. The streets were packed with shouting mammals, and not in anger like a normal protest, this was screams of sheer animal terror.

 

Judy switched on her comm to Clawhauser.  “Officer Hopps here. I’m outside, but it looks a little like the way in is blocked.”

 

[Oh,] the cheetah sounded strained as he answered.  [Just, stay where you are. A couple of the riot cops will come to pick you and Nick’s, Nick’s…]  He couldn’t bring himself to say the last word.

 

The crowd shuffled as an elephant and a rhino decked in heavy plate armor shoved their way over towards her, unfortunately directing the mob’s attention in her direction.  The panicked mammals reached the rabbit first and began pounding on the sides of the car. Judy kept her hand on her Agonizer as she listened to their terrified shouts.

 

“Help us!”

 

“The end is nigh!”

 

“Oh God is that a dead body?”

 

“Terrors from beyond the stars have arrived!”

 

“Please, help.”

 

Finally, the rhino, McHorn she thought, threw aside two of the rioters and reached the driver’s door.  With some hesitation Judy carefully began to open the door. She’d barely opened it a crack before a pink-skinned arm ending in a split hoof wedged its way in and grabbed her.  “The Great Old Ones have arrived!” There was an electric tingle on her wrist where she’d been grabbed and then the world around her disappeared.

 

Judy found herself in a dark expanse of distant stars in infinite blackness.  She was reaching for a strange device hanging in open space, almost as black as the endless night around it.  As she approached it the artifact suddenly shifted, impaling her arm on a spike that had seemingly just grown out of it.  The black then began to flow around her arm like water going downhill or a time-lapse of mold growing. She felt like it was not only violating her body but her mind as well, disconnecting and reconnecting neural pathways according to its own indecipherable will…

 

Judy snapped back to reality with a start.  Crying in anguish she swung her Agonizer into the pig that grabbed her and let loose with a microwave burst strong enough to cauterize pain receptors.  His grip slackened just enough for McHorn to pull him off of her. “Come on,” he commanded, picking her up one-handed.

 

[Sky, what just happened?] The bunny cop asked silently as she hung limply over the big officer’s shoulder, unable to do more than wave her weapon menacingly at rioters and look back at the elephant.

 

[A raving madmammal grabbed you and you shot him with a microwave pistol on full power.] Sky answered.  [Was that a reflex?]

 

The elephant clumsily shoved the headless fox into a black body bag and Judy just looked on in confusion.  [Just that? What about between the grab and the shooting?]

 

[Judy, just over three seconds passed between him taking hold and you zapping him.  If it felt longer it was probably just adrenaline.]

 

[But…] the bunny left off as she wondered.  Was she going insane from the strain? Or could that vision or hallucination or whatever possibly mean something?  Her attention was drawn away by a pair of missiles launching from one of the trucks forming an improvised barricade around the police station, bringing down two drones similar to the one that had carried off Nick’s head.  A third drone managed to release a stream of silvery liquid onto the crowd before being shot down by a second volley.

 

The screams of terror turned to pain as the silver fluid climbed up the mammals’ bodies, dissolving their flesh as it went.  “Nanoswarm!” Judy shouted, finally snapping out of her fugue and scrambling out of the rhino’s grasp. “EMP! We need EMPs!”

 

Grunting, McHorn pulled a spherical grenade from his belt, popped the cap, and threw it at the nearest concentration of grey goo.  The grenade exploded in a burst of light and the nanoswarm collapsed into an inert puddle in a 50-foot radius around the blast, only to come creeping back to life from the edges in seconds later.  The bunny pulled a second EMP from the rhino’s belt and prepared to throw, but he yelled “not now, too close!” He pointed towards the barrier, Guardian anti-nanotech swarms buzzing around like dust motes, occasionally darting towards a stray silver tendril.

 

Judy looked towards the center of the swarm, as she watched a middle-aged tiger was stripped to the bones and toppled over.  She would back and chucked the grenade straight for the epicenter, hoping to neutralize the worst of the disaster. But to her fascinated horror, a tentacle of grey goo shot up and grabbed it before it could detonate, dissolving it harmlessly.

 

The officers passed through the clouds of benign nanotech and into the door held open by an irate chief Fangmeyer.  “Hopps, report!” She demanded.

 

Gasping for breath, Judy babbled something about “drones, Nick, his head…”  all while keeping her hands on her holstered Agonizer and the last of McHorn’s EMPs.

 

Frustrated, the tiger yelled at a medtech coming to check the bunny’s vitals.  “Get her into an Ego Bridge and backed up. If I know her she’ll be running back out with a plasma rifle as soon as she catches her breath.  She’s the only one of us who’s seen a Headhunter up close and we can’t lose that information.”

 

“Got it, Chief.”  The medic brought Judy over to a set of chairs with bulbous apparati above the headrests.  As soon as she was sat down the device unfolded like a giant plastic flower and grasped her cranium, producing a tingling feeling as it scanned her brain.  The medtech injected Judy with a light tranquilizer and she began to calm down as it kicked in. After several minutes of staring into space she suddenly remembered what was going on and tried to straighten up.

 

“Wait,” she shouted to anyone who could hear.  “We’ve got to help those people outside!”

 

“Scan 87% complete.”  The Ego Bridge’s interface said.  “Please remain still until backup is finished.”

 

“There’s no time for that!”  She shouted back, grabbing at the Bridge’s head.  “Those people are getting eaten alive, we have to…”

 

Suddenly, the view of the ZPD backup clinic vanished, replaced by a featureless white landscape.  Judy had no time to wonder what was going on before the logo of a red-and-blue solar system and the words “Species Consortium Indenture Services” faded into view.

 

“Please remain calm.”  A disembodied voice stated flatly.  “We are sorry to inform you that your last sleeve has died since your most recent backup and your cortical stack could not be recovered.  As your backup service has been unable to provide you with a replacement sleeve we will begin your free evaluation for our indentured servitude programs.”

 

If Judy had been capable of doing so in that basic simulspace she would have broken down in anguished tears at the dawning reality of her situation.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Finding herself reduced to a body-less infomorph after her backup and subsequent death during the Fall of Zootopia Judy finds herself forced to make a deal with the new masters of the Post-Fall solar system in order to obtain a new form.

_ Valles-New Zootopia, Mares, 10 AF _

 

Gazelle was at some Oligarch’s weekly party when her muse chimed in with a none-too-welcome interruption.  [Ma’am, I’ve found a rumor on social media that you might be rather interested in.]

 

Scanning the crowd, the celebrity singer and dancer gauged that she could go off in the corner and see what had come up without taking a hit to her f-rep.  As she pulled up the screencaps and clips her muse had found her eyes widened in amazement. [Judy Hopps? They finally found her?]

 

[It would seem so, mistress.  These rumors are barely more than 15 minutes old. She hasn’t been listed on IndEx yet but I’m certain she will be listed at a very high price very soon.]

 

Gazelle sighed, she had been lucky enough to still have enough of her pre-Fall fortune to buy a sleeve on Mares and farcast to it during the evacuation.  But, she knew far too many washed-up former celebrities who had been less frugal and ended up indentured to perverted Oligarchs or jilted ex-lovers. She could probably name half a dozen mammals at this very event who would love to make the first bunny cop their sex slave.  Such a waste really. Gazelle could attempt to buy Judy’s indenture herself, but she knew the bunny would resent being turned into a mere celebrity bodyguard, and it would raise all sorts of suspicions if she simply let her go. And given her, “side job”, suspicion was the last thing Gazelle wanted.

 

Come to think of it, Judy Hopps might make an ideal recruit for that particular organization.  The only problem was, Hopps was better known for uncovering conspiracies than joining them. This would need to be handled delicately, she’d need to see why they were necessary, need to be in a situation where such a thing was possible.

 

One of the Direct Action security guards at the door caught Gazelle’s attention as they spotted and shot down a paparazzi drone that came too close.  Of course! They could make good use of Judy and it wouldn’t be too hard to engineer an encounter between them and some Exsurgent pack. But they’d need some incentive to buy her.

 

Her train of thought was briefly interrupted by the approach of an ursine worker pod carrying a shrew woman in his open palm.  “Gazelle!” The shrew screeched at the antelope before her. “Have you heard the news? Judy Hopps’ Ego has been found.”

 

“I was just thinking about it myself.”  Gazelle replied to Fru Fru Bigs. Then she was reminded of something about the Soricid Oligarch and after quickly confirming with her muse asked.  “Actually, do you still have that prototype sleeve that FauxFur discontinued?”

 

“Why, yes.”  The shrew responded excitedly.  “Did you think maybe she would like it?”

 

“Honestly, I don’t know.” Gazelle said contemplatively.  “I was just thinking that Direct Action might want her expertise and that morph would be quite useful to her in such a profession.”

 

“Ah yes.”  Fru Fru put on a feigned tone of regret and pity.  “It’s such a shame that FauxFur never put that model into mass production.”

 

“Yes, such a pity.  If only someone could convince them to give it another shot?”

 

The shrew seemed to consider the possibility a minute, then gestured for her carrier to take them away.  “Well, it’s been nice catching up, Gazelle, but we have some other social obligations to fulfill. See you later.”

 

Gazelle watched them leave, hoping that the hints she’d planted would bear fruit soon enough to make a difference.

\---

_ Secure transmission: _

_ Agent, we have received word that a notable person on our watchlist by the name of Judith Laverne Hopps has been retrieved from dead storage.  We require a fork of this individual’s Ego for interrogation. You are not cleared to know why. _

\---

The late Judith L. Hopps looked over the application that presently formed the entirety of the external world from her viewpoint.  She had an idea of what was going on, while it was possible to scan and digitally recreate a mammal’s brain in a new body those “sleeves” were not cheap.  A synthmorph could be fabricated in a matter of hours but it still took years for a biomorph to grow to maturity and since many post-mammals preferred to retain skin biomorphs remained in high demand.  As such, many resleeving services offered the option of “indentured servitude” to clients who couldn’t afford to buy new sleeves outright. In such cases, the client was contracted to work for one of the hypercorporations for a period of time until they’d been determined to have paid for their sleeve.  It was especially popular in off-Ark colonies as transmitting an uploaded “Ego” to a locally fabbed synthmorph or infomorph server was far faster and cheaper than physical transport.

 

As Judy filled out the application she hoped that her twenty-four years experience in the ZPD merited a short indenture at some decent job.

 

Once she’d finally finished the hellishly long application she submitted it with a mental sigh of relief and was rewarded with about ten seconds of empty space before another sudden transition.  Without warning Judy found herself sitting in an office chair staring across a conference table at two mammals dressed in finely tailored business suits. She was momentarily shocked to feel that she had a body again, but any hopes that she’d already been re-sleeved were dashed at the sight of her stiff CGI fur, she was evidently still in a sim.  With that cleared up, she turned to the other mammals, or their avatars, “who are you, and where am I?”

 

One of the mammals, a wolf who towered over her in his high-backed seat instead asked her a different question.  “You are Judith Laverne Hopps, correct?”

 

The bunny, getting annoyed with how her subjective day had turned out, snapped back, “yes I’m Judy Hopps.  The first bunny cop in Zootopia. Now apparently deceased after twenty-four years on the force but hopefully only temporarily.  Now, would you mind explaining why ZPD isn’t handling my resleeve?”

 

The wolf sighed as he processed her answer.  “To answer your first question, Ms. Hopps, my name is Harry Wolford and I’m a MR representative for Direct Action.”  He gestured to the guinea pig sitting next to him, “this is Mr. Joshua Lemming, manager of FauxFur’s Valles-New Zootopia branch.  Whose server this simulspace is hosted upon, to answer your second question.”

 

Judy considered this new information she’d been presented with.  “I think I’ve heard of FauxFur, you’re a hypercorp that produces high-quality biomorphs, right?”  At the rodent’s excited nod she continued. “I’m afraid I haven’t heard of Direct Action though… wait, did you say Valles-New Zootopia?  I thought that was on Mares? I didn’t include farcasting in my resleeving plan!’

 

Wolford’s eyes narrowed at the bunny sitting across the table from him.  “I assure you, if there was a resleeving facility left on Ark we would be having this conversation on the old homeworld.  As for my employers, we’re a relatively new hypercorporation that formed in the aftermath of the event that left Ark inhospitable.  What do you remember before your backup?”

 

Judy’s virtual ears drooped in dismay at that statement.  Ark, gone? How bad had things become? “I know there were drones killing mammals in the streets, one took off Nick’s head with a buzzsaw and I saw another one drop a dissembler swarm on a crowd.  I… I didn’t have time to check my newsfeeds or get briefed before Chief Fangmeyer made me get backed up.”

 

“Considering your circumstances,” the wolf replied, “I might excuse your apparent disrespect.  Had you heard of the TITANs?”

 

Judy thought back, “they were experimental AGIs created by National Security or something, right?”

 

“An experiment in removing the limitations set in the ancient AGI designs.”  Wolford specified. “And the worst mistake mammalkind ever made. They hacked into several nanofactories and built themselves an army.  Sometimes they sent out Headhunter drones like the one you saw, other times they infected mammals with nanovirii that rewrote their brains into their puppets, or worse.  Eventually the government resorted to using antimatter bombs against them.” Something about the mention of a nanovirus triggered the momentary flash of void-black tentacles to cross Judy’s mind.  Disregarding her expression of shock and terror the wolf decided to throw in something a bit more personal to her. “Some of the survivors provided XP footage of you piloting an exowalker, covering their evacuation to the beanstalk.  Unfortunately the car that was supposed to be bringing you up to orbit never arrived.”

 

“Did I have a plasma rifle?”  She asked. At his puzzled expression she elaborated, “the Chief was worried I’d grab a plasma rifle and run out to fight before they had a chance to debrief me about the drones I’d encountered.”

 

“She had good judgement.”  Wolford commented. “Listen, Direct Action is a security company founded by the remnants of several police departments, militaries, and private security contractors destroyed in the Fall.  We provide contract police services to habitats and cities that can’t afford to maintain their own cops, as well as corporate and personal security and anti-piracy or -terrorist protection.  Your expertise would be invaluable to us and we are willing to offer you a very generous indenture contract.”

 

That gave Judy pause, was he seriously offering her a job as some sort of corporate cop in exchange for her new body?  No, it wouldn’t be simply a job, it would be practically slavery, serving the company without any real pay for however many years they could add onto the contract.  Still, even without knowing the actual terms it sounded like a tempting offer already. “What did you have in mind?”

 

Wolford pulled out an anachronistic paper file and handed it to her.  “Within is the contract we’re prepared to offer. In summary, you are to be retained for a minimum of two years, during that time you will be placed on a rotated duty with security stations across and orbiting Mares, you may also be asked to consult with a specific station on occasion.  In addition, we have worked out a sponsorship deal with FauxFur, they have agreed to provide a discount on your new sleeve provided that you use one of their new prototype lapine morphs while on the job. You will even have the opportunity to own the prototype at the end of your indenture.  You are free to review the full details in the file if you wish to do so.”

 

Judy picked up the file and info appeared on the cover, she took one look at the byte size and asked “you mind if my muse helps me with this?”  The wolf shrugged and moments later a familiar arctic vixen materialized next to Judy.

 

[Welcome back,] the program said.  [Wish it were under better circumstances though.]

 

Judy stared at the contract in her hand while sending a stream of digital thoughts at her muse.  [Sky, in order, I want you to tell me whether our friends here can see and hear you, whether we have mesh access, and your opinion on this contract once I’m done reading it.]

 

There was a moment’s pause before Sky answered.  [We’ve been shunted to an instance of this simulspace running at a subjective speed six times faster than IRL.  They might record our conversations but not observe them in real time. As for mesh access it seems that we’re on an isolated local mesh, thought there appear to be several databases that I can access.]  Judy had been afraid of that, and became even more suspicious at that information. [Shall I check out the databases while you’re reading?”]

 

Judy wasn’t even halfway done with the first paragraph of legalese, it made her police academy textbooks look like children’s books.  [Search  _ all _ the databases and bring me a summary of the current political climate.]

 

The virtual vulpine raised a concerned eyebrow.  [ _ All _ the databases?]

 

The bunny repeated her emphasis.  [ _ All  _ the databases you can access.  Fork yourself if necessary.]

 

Sky sighed, then there was a moment where Judy saw two overlapping outlines of her muse.  [My fork is away.] She said, then discreetly signed a number “six” in Zootopian Sign Language, suggesting that there were actually half a dozen Skys crawling around the network.  Good, she’d caught the hint.

 

As the AI was working Judy tried to parse the contract.  Two years sounded rather short for an indenture based on what she’d heard, but that might have been explained by the FauxFur sponsorship deal.  Otherwise it sounded like some of the officer exchange programs she’d participated in. Jumping from one post to another two months later. The only difference was that she wouldn’t get paid until the term was over.  The only real surprise came when she found out which morph she’d be promoting. “A Fury? Are you kidding me?” She exclaimed out loud.

 

The Sky fork still watching Judy turned to look at her.  [Weren’t you the one who said that species shouldn’t matter?  Why is it so surprising that somebody made a bunny version of the Fury morph?]

 

[It’s a frontline combat morph,] she responded, [a super soldier.  Even if you tacked on a cat’s reflexes, a wolf’s pack instincts, a bear’s strength, and bioweave armor you couldn’t seriously expect a little bunny to last long on the battlefield.  I could understand something like a Ghost but if I were sleeving a Fury I’d choose a species with some more mass than that.]

 

Sky thought for a minute, then the double-vision effect returned briefly.  [My forks reintegrated, based on the new information I’ve gathered I might have a few ideas.] She signed a “five”, one of the forks hadn’t made it back for some reason, Judy hoped it had self-deleted if it had been caught hacking.  [It would seem that Mares and other locations under Species Consortium jurisdiction are dominated by the hypercorps and Furies are more often employed by private security, in particular the “discrete bodyguard” market. Who would expect to get walloped by a bunny after all?]

 

Judy sighed, she supposed it did make some sense by the strange logic of the market. It would clearly take her some time to get used to this new Hypercapitalist world.  And speaking of which. [Back up, who’s the Species Consortium?]

 

[Ah, yes, the info you asked me to gather.] Sky waved a hand and the same red-and-blue logo Judy had seen before the indenture application had loaded now appeared above the muse’s hand.  [I’m sorry to say that the United Mammalian Species government did not survive the Fall. In its’ wake mammalkind has divided into factions, Mares is largely under the control of the largest faction, the Species Consortium.  The government is a representative democracy in part, but it seems that the hypercorps operating in their jurisdiction have their own representative council in the Consortium government. Needless to say, the government often prioritizes hypercorp rights.]

 

[I’m not sure I feel comfortable about that.] Judy noted.  [I mean, I know that corporations held a lot of influence in congress back on Ark, but formalizing it makes me feel a bit uneasy.  What about the other factions?]

 

[Unfortunately, it seems that the other factions have adopted philosophies based on perceptions of certain species’ “natural” lifestyles.] Sky continued. [That isn’t to say that they are exclusively composed of a specific species or clade, just that they think the social structure is ideal.  Of those factions, the Lupine-Lapine Alliance and Chiroptavian Constellation seem closest to old Zootopia in political-economic structure, but the LLA is waning in influence with several of their habitats voting to join the Consortium and the Constellation tailors most of their aerostat habitats for flying species.  The Ariesian Republic is a bioconservative military junta, I would advise never going even close to their space. The Tarandus Commonwealth is experimenting with a mesh-mediated form of direct democracy and largely non-currency based technosocialist economy, they seem fairly nice but they’ve formed an alliance with several anarchist factions.]

 

[Anarchists?] Judy asked, surprised.  [You mean mammals who advocate no laws?  How is that even possible?]

 

[Apparently, they do have some common rules, but they don’t have governments in the traditional sense to enforce them.  The databases had information on the three largest factions of anarchist. The Mustelidians are anarcho-capitalists, they individually subscribe to different hypercorps that provide security and judicial services to their subscribers.  Murinists are collectivists on the other hand, they organize into collectives that provide for their own and reject the concept of money completely. The Vermin are a bit, hard to describe.]

 

[Try.]

[Very well.  The faction who have adopted the name of “Vermin” are nomads, they live in ships that were apparently rejected from overcrowded habitats and continually wander the solar system in loose “swarms” that occasionally stop to trade.  Their philosophy is described as a contradictory mess of tribalism and collectivism, hedonism and altruism.] Sky slumped on a chair next to Judy’s. [And that’s my summary of the major political climate. Anything else?]

 

Judy tossed the contract file on the table in exasperation.  [Just, tell me your opinion on the contract, please?]

 

[In all honesty,] the AI replied, picking up the file.  [It’s your best possible option given the situation. If you reject it the odds are you’ll end up scrubbing algae tanks for ten years or as some hypercorp executive’s “personal assistant”.]

 

The bunny glanced over at the two hypercorp executives on the other side of the table.  They’d barely moved since she had decided to review the contract. With a sigh, she took the contract from Sky again, scrolled down to the bottom and found a pair of checkboxes labeled “I agree,” and “don’t accept.”  After some hesitation she checked the former.

 

Slowly the execs’ sim re-synchronized with their own.  Their movements accelerated until eventually they didn’t seem to be moving in molasses.  “So, you’ve agreed then? Excellent.” Judy barely had time to formulate a reply before her perspective cut out again.

 

She found herself waking up on a bed in the middle of a narrow room as a pair of rodent orderlies fussed over her prone form.  Judy focused and carefully lifted one stiff arm up to her line of sight. Fur, real grey fur, she was either in a real body now or a reasonably high-res sim.  She flexed the new muscles, they felt much denser and stronger than her old ones. Her skin seemed stiffer, probably from the cultured spider silk strung beneath it for armor, but her responses were faster, her arms moved almost before she was done thinking about it. She tried to find her voice, “can I… can I stand up?”

 

The orderly nearest her face nodded, “you can try ma’am.  If you feel like it.” Something about his voice sounded odd.  He appeared to be the size of a mouse, but his voice was deeper than she typically associated with a larger species, like a rat.  And his ears were proportionally smaller, and his tail was thick and scaly instead of thin and furred. He did look like a rat.

 

“If you don’t mind my asking,” Judy asked as she sat up, swinging a leg over the side of the bed.  “What species are you?”

 

The rodent orderly cocked his head at her, “ _ Rattus norvegicus _ , Ms. Hopps.  Are you okay?”

 

Judy looked around the room, it wasn’t just her attendants, the whole scale of the room seemed off somehow.  Like not everything was the right size. Her eyes caught on a set of length markers set into the doorframe, presumably for the newly sleeved to check their new measurements, and staggered over.  On reaching the markers she stretched up to her full height and looked at the number that was level with her eyes. “Why aren’t I surprised now?”

\---

Two days later, Vermin ship  _ Inconveniently Tied _ , Festival Swarm

 

An orange-furred half-mechanical, half-vat-cultured flesh finger brushed against a holo-display showing a newsfeed from the inner system.  The headline article read “Hero cop of Zootopia signs contract with Direct Action”, the photos were a 30-year-old pic of Judy posing with some of the then-new equipment found in the Cornucopia Machines, side by side with pic of a much more muscular bunny in modern armor standing next to a pair of other officers, the scale made it look like the second bunny was over a meter tall.  “Heh,” the hand’s owner gave a low chuckle. “Good for you Carrots. Maybe you’ll have the chance to arrest me again.”

\---

Zootopian-Eclipse Phase faction equivalents:

Species Consortium: Planetary Consortium

Lupine-Lapine Alliance: Lunar-Lagrange Alliance

Chiroptavian Constellation: Morningstar Constellation

Ariesian Republic: Jovian Junta

Tarandus Commonwealth: Titanians

Mustelidians: Extropians

Murinists: Anarchists (with a capital “A”)

Vermin: Scum (duh)


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> We finally get to see what Nick's backup has been up to since the Fall.

Farcasting wasn’t much like physical travel.  You sat down and let an Ego bridge grab your head, waited a few minutes, then suddenly found yourself in a different body on a different world trying to adjust to your new skin.  Nicholas Wilde had done it dozens of times and there was still that awkward transition period, especially when sleeving into a radically different morph, like the lion he had ordered this time.  Usually he could play it off in some way, especially when his cover mandated pretending that he was sleeving his birth species, in this case he decided to go with anger, considering the justification.

 

“Are you kidding me?”  He shouted as he waved a blurry hand in front of his face.  “This sleeve is half-blind. What are you trying to pull here?”

 

The clouded leopard working the desk sighed and informed him, in as bored a tone as he could manage, “you were willing to purchase a Flat with genetic defects.  In this case the defect happened to be nearsightedness.”

 

Nick squinted at the display on the table, “I paid 3000 credits for this thing.  If it can’t even cross the street safely it’s not worth 2K.”

 

He was pretty sure he could tell the clerk was rolling his eyes at him.  “You were informed that the sleeve had genetic defects, I cannot offer a refund based on what you think it should be worth.  But tell you what, I’ll throw in Ecto lenses with vision correction for free.”

 

He tried to see the contact lenses on the nanofab tray, they wouldn’t be worth even a tenth of what he paid for the sleeve.  But with a Flat morph that didn’t even have basic biomods, much less mesh inserts, they’d be needed, and he could tell that this drone was too bored to sway.   _ Where’s a sympathetic half-crooked cop when you need one? _  The thought came to him, unbidden, but he couldn’t quite place its origin.  Seeing that it couldn’t be helped Nick groaned and took the Ecto lenses and bone transduction speaker, he’d just need to get the eyes fixed during the next step of the con.

 

As he applied the Ecto parts his muse came online.  A grey rabbit with stripes appeared in his field of view.  [I hope that’s you.] Jack said without prompting.

 

[Who else would it be?] The fox in a lion’s skin muttered subvocally as he tried to adjust his mic.  [Are we still on with our appointments?]

 

[Ethel Otterton hasn’t said anything to contradict our appointment time.]  The AI bunny replied. [But Badgerson is getting a little impatient, he wants to see the sleeve as soon as possible.]

 

Enthusiastic customers were generally the best to sell to, but sometimes they got a little too insistent and screwed up the whole timetable.  The bodysculpting he had in mind usually took some 12 hours, on top of the eye fix that he’d need before pawning this sleeve off. [Ask Ethie how quickly she can do it, and get the eyes functional.  Send whatever specs you can pick up if it’ll help.]

 

Nick set off down the habitat’s torus towards the cosmetic surgeon he had made the arrangements with when his muse chimed again.  [She says she was expecting the body bank to pull that kind of crap, that particular Furotic subsidiary doesn’t really have the best Rep you know.  She might be able to cut the bodysculpt down to eight hours, and she has an idea for performing the vision correction on the space elevator ride down.]

 

[Knotting Hypercorps.] He commented.  [Doesn’t matter if they’re Consortium or Mustelidian.  They’ll still screw you over with technicalities instead of straight-up scamming you.]

 

[Like you haven’t resorted to weasel-words in the past.]  Nick couldn’t quite remember why he’d set Jack to be so mouthy.

\---

“You know I don’t like this, right?”  The otter doctor commented as she waved a scan wand over Nick’s temporary sleeve, fur wet from the vat of nanobots that had reshaped it.  “It’s not just the scam aspect, I know it’s for a good cause. But you of all mammals would know the history my family has with that lion.”  She pointed at the reflection of the rebuilt feline in the mirror.

 

“Think of it another way Ethie.”  He replied, momentarily surprised at how different his voice sounded now.  “You’re swindling a fan of the dirtbag politician who locked your dad up like a dumb beast.  You could consider it revenge.”

 

“That’s a stretch and you know it Wilde.”  Ethel pointed accusingly at his face. “The Consortium only allows Furotic to operate this habitat in Mares space because we (mostly) play by their rules.  If your little fraud jeopardizes our position here…”

 

“What?  Just because some rich kid was tricked into buying a defective Flat that he thought was a heirloom morph of Leodore Lionhart?”  He gave an approximation of the ex-politician’s signature smile. “You know that the Hypercorp council considers Furotic’s competition the only reason FauxFur hasn’t amassed enough capital to buy a seat, and they definitely don’t want that.”  He switched tones, making an effort not to subconsciously mimic the “public official voice” he was familiar with. “Anyways, you said you had an idea for fixing the eyes on the way down?”

 

“Yeah, just let me get my field kit.”  She flowed off the table to gather a few odds and ends and stick them in a bag before they left.

\---

They hopped a quick shuttle from the Furotic station to the port at the top of the Mares space elevator.  Nick was relieved to see that customs was fooled by the fake ID nanotats Ethel had changed, they now traced the sleeve back to a dummy company supposedly based in the LLA whose owners weren’t interested in public attention.  The elevator was far shorter than the one that had fallen over Ark, but it would still take nine hours to reach the surface. He led his otter companion past the crowd of workers going back down to the surface at the end of their shift and to the private cabin Jack had hastily booked for them.

 

Ethel looked around the cabin, it had two lion-sized beds and an entertainment center on the other side of the room.  “Nice and roomy.” She commented.

 

“Yes, well, most pairs who book the same cabin are the same size.”  The temporary lion grunted, sitting on the lower bed.

 

“I can’t imagine this was cheap.”  The otter commented, tapping one of the walls with a claw.  “Thin, but still.”

 

“Yeah, but if we play our cards right this will still make a nice profit for us.”  He laid back and stared up at the mattress above him. “Assuming you manage to fix these stupid eyes like you said you would.”

 

The semi-aquatic weasel hopped up on the bed and started laying out her tools on Nick’s chest.  “Yes, about that. This procedure might be a little old-fashioned, it’s going to be messy, not cheap to clean up without leaving evidence.”

 

“You an-caps are all about the money, aren’t you?”  Nick sighed.

 

“Don’t insult me,” Ethel replied, pulling out an inhaler.  “I’m an anarcho-mutualist, we just acknowledge that society isn’t quite post-scarcity yet.  Which means that the free clinic where I volunteer in my downtime can’t run in a vacuum.”

 

Nick rolled his eyes back and said something softly but audible to his muse, “Jack, share the formulas we got from that friend of Finnick’s with her as soon as we have mesh access back.”

 

“Oh good,” Ethel said.  “You Vermin are always coming up with new drugs, aren’t you?  I could probably find some use for whatever you’ve got.” She passed him the inhaler.  “Now, remove your Ecto lenses and puff this.”

 

Nick carefully slid the contacts out of his eyes and set them aside on the desk before inhaling the offered drug.  In seconds the residual aches from the bodysculpting that he hadn’t even paid attention to vanished and his mouth involuntarily formed a nervous smile.  “Grin? Ethie, how much is this going to hurt?”

 

In response, the otter plunged a pair of claws into the lion-sleeve’s corneas, the drug removing the pain but Nick still had to suppress a scream of surprise.  She scraped at the eyes for a few seconds before she was satisfied, then his dim vision was completely occluded by a nanobandage, its nanobots tingling across his face.  “It should be done by the time we land.” Ethel Otterton stated before clambering off somewhere. “Hope you had a good audiobook downloaded.”

 

Nick slumped back on the bed, carefully feeling the edges of the nanite-infused cloth adhered to his face.  “You enjoyed that, didn’t you?” The otter said nothing.

\---

As the car slowed to a halt before making landfall Nick tentatively peeled off the nanobandage, finding that he had 20/20 vision again.  He still needed the lenses to see the mesh though so he re-inserted them, Jack adjusting the corrective settings until it didn’t interfere with his sight.  Ethel was nowhere to be found when he left the cabin, but he received confirmation when mesh access was restored and the drug recipes were sent off.

 

Waiting for him in the lobby was the buyer, a badger wearing a pinstriped smartsuit set to keep the black and white tastefully lined up with his own coat.  “Ah,” he said upon spotting Nick. “I see you chose to wear the sleeve down here. Was that wise?”

 

“Keeping it warmed up for you.”  Nick replied quickly. “I assure you it’s safer walking around the passenger compartments than in a gel tank in cargo.”

 

“But then you wear it out more quickly!”  He shouted in exasperation. “You know these Flats don’t have even basic biomods.”

 

“Exactly. You wanted a genuine replica, and so you have it.”  The fox flexed his lion sleeve’s hands experimentally. “Leodore Lionhart was born before gene splicing so neither does the clone.”

 

“Hmm,” the badger took one of his outstretched hands for closer examination.  “Seems to be in good condition, and it looks like the photos of my grandmother’s employer.  I’ll need to take it back to my private clinic for closer examination but does 20,000 sound good for an initial offer?”  He gestured over towards a flying car that had just pulled up in front of the terminal.

 

“Twenty thousand?”  Nick called after the wealthy mustelid walking off towards his car.  “That’s barely enough to break even. I had to pawn my own sleeve just to afford transport.”  He’d been hoping to just transfer the sleeve at the spaceport’s egocasting facility and cast back home before the mark realized he’d been scammed.  If he was going to insist on using his own home equipment for the resleeve things could be complicated.

 

“That’s unfortunate,” the badger replied.  “But you understand, I can’t pay a fortune for a morph without verification.”  The door to the car opened as he approached and the suspicious buyer slid across the seat to the far side.

 

Nick sighed and got into the seat next to him, the cushions molding themselves to his leonine physique automatically.  “All right, but the lender is charging interest by the day, I want at least 40 for the delay.”

 

“You can’t be serious, that’s enough to buy a Fury.”

“Oh, but Furies are mass produced in a variety of species ranging from,” he paused as his vision blurred for a second.  Was Ethel’s improvised surgery wearing off or something? “...Ranging from bears to bunnies, apparently. But you can’t find too many Lionhart heirloom morphs as you well know.”

 

“Something wrong, Mr. Wilde?”  The badger asked, setting off the fox’s instincts a second later.

 

“Wait, I never told you that...” his vision blurred again but he spotted the patch adhered to the middle of his palm this time.  “Oh, scat.”

\---

The first thing Nick noticed upon waking was that he’d resleeved again, that much was obvious from the cameras he had for eyes and the seams he felt running along his vat-grown skin.  The second was that his sleeve wasn’t male.

 

“I died again, didn’t I?”  He said out loud with a sigh.  Turning his attention to the one he thought responsible he shouted out, “Switching the sex, very funny Phil!  You know it will only take a week to change back so have your fun while it lasts.” He stood up, but found his movement arrested by a heavy chain secured to his neck, surprised, he felt a thick leather collar around his neck, and above it a wire mask, no, a muzzle.

 

Starting to wonder what kind of sick joke his friend was playing, Nick looked around, he was not in Phil’s body bank, he was in a dark and dusty warehouse that he doubted would fit anywhere on the Vermin swarm he’d called home for the past four years.  And aside from the sex this pod didn’t quite feel like his normal sleeve actually. He held a hand up to a faint stream of light leaking in through a window and noted that the fur wasn’t red but blue, which didn’t mean anything as dye wasn’t uncommon. Carefully, Nick squeezed a couple fingers through the muzzle’s wires and lifted his eyelid, he could make out part of the serial number tattooed on the inside if he had the right light, and it wasn’t familiar.

 

The fear hit him like a brick then.  He lost all semblance of self-control and collapsed into a curled-up ball, mewling and whimpering in terror as half-coherent memories of torment flashed through his head.  Torments he was certain he would be revisiting soon, why else would he be downloaded into a tied-up vixen pleasure pod?

 

“Wilde,” a voice purred above him.  “Did you truly believe that you had escaped us?”  Nick cringed as his captor scraped a claw along the surface of a metal crate.  “You should have known better, no soul ever leaves Legba’s clutches. Have you forgotten the punishments we inflicted upon you so readily?”

 

“I tried,” the hapless fox whimpered almost inaudibly.  After his liberation from Nine Lives he’d begged the psychosurgeons to excise all his memories of his half-decade in captivity, but they’d been unable to remove them all.  The agonies he still remembered were horrible, but he knew they weren’t the worst he’d suffered. It was clear his captors intended to remind him of the rest. “No, please…”

 

Someone standing on padded feet crouched down next to him and caressed his face with a half-retracted claw.  “Unfortunately, we can’t visit the most exquisite corrections upon you here, and it’ll be another few hours before we can Darkcast back home.  But the boys wanted a taste of what you will suffer.”

 

The speaker, whom Nick could now identify as a lanky puma, started to lift Nick’s face to meet the gaze of the others in the room whom he hadn’t even known were there.  Most of them were felines of some sort but through the fear he couldn’t identify anything but their hungry stares. His captor displayed the limp vixen to his friends, and slowly began to walk his claws down his stomach, they felt like searing needles.

 

Nick couldn’t even dare to move under the paralyzing fear gripping his nervous system.  He was unable to resist as the puma’s claws inched towards his groin. But, seconds before he reached a more sensitive area, the fear suddenly diminished, as if someone had flicked a switch in his limbic system.  The fear wasn’t gone, but he was no longer immobilized. [Nick,] a voice in his head spoke slowly, [run!]

 

The rumbling sound of something large rolling along a stone floor approached and a black metal sphere crashed through the door, slowly rolling to a stop two meters from the nearest thug.  Panels in the sides opened and three arms unfolded from within, all of which ended in weapons. The shocked mobsters had barely enough time to yell “Cops!” before a burst of railgun fire slammed into them.

 

Nick took advantage of the confusion to wriggle loose of the puma’s grip, scurrying for the nearest stack of crates, only to be arrested by the chain about his neck.  “No you don’t!” The big cat shouted, starting to chase after him. “Nobody escapes from-” He was cut off as his throat exploded in ruby laser fire.

 

The spherical Rover pushed the toppling feline aside with its clawed third arm, rolling closer to the chained fox.  The synth’s surface rippled and flickered before resolving into the image of a familiar fennec’s face. “Didn’t they teach you anything in fuzz school Nicky?”

 

Nick felt his fear start to melt away and slowly be replaced by embarrassment.  “Finnick,” he said, with forced coolness, “nice ball. Couldn’t find a Reaper on such short notice?”

 

“Glitter said it would attract too much attention.”  Finnick rotated his railgun arm around and fired a single shot at a thug who was still stirring.  “Want me to cut that chain?”

 

“If you wouldn’t mind.”  Nick held a length of the chain up vertically between his hands and the fennec in a ball sliced it with a quick burst of his laser.  Digging at the tight leather straps on the muzzle he added “this too, please?”

 

Finnick sighed and swiped with his cyberclaws, shaving off an inch of fur along with the strap.  “The others are outside in the car. I need to go silence the witnesses.” He rolled over to the puma and started digging at the corpse’s neck, “like the new look by the way, you should try being a vixen more often.”  Nick tried to wrap his fluffy tail over his female anatomy and dashed for the door Finnick had bashed through.

 

Outside a four-seat buggy with tinted black windows was parked directly in front of the door, opening a hatch onto an empty seat as Nick approached.  Ethel was sitting in the seat on the other side looking at him with amusement. Nick jumped in the seat and slammed the door shut behind him. “Well, you and Finnick are here,” he commented, “I suppose Flash is the car?”

 

“Hi, Nick,” a voice said from the vehicle’s speakers.  “I, am, actually, just, a, Beta, fork. How, are, you, feeling…”

 

“Great, just great.”  The fox replied when the informorph sloth seemed to have finished his sentence.  “I thought I was going to make a big score today, got caught in a trap by my worst enemies, and got found in a compromising position by the rest of my cell.  How could this day possibly go better?”

 

“I thought you Anarchists didn’t believe in money?”  Ethel sniped.

 

“I’m  _ Vermin _ , fish-breath.”  Nick replied. “We don’t use credits with each other, but we do recognize that it’s a useful scam for convincing other mammals to give us useful stuff.  I was going to split my profits between the ship’s upgrade fund and Firewall anyways.”

 

The backhatch of the buggy opened and Finnick rolled in.  “Guess you’ll be taking a loss on this con now Nicky. Too bad there wasn’t a gullible little bunny to pay your start-up costs for you.”

 

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”  Nick replied. “Anyways, how’d you know I was in trouble?”

 

The otter sighed.  “Glitter couldn’t get hold of you and asked us where you were.  I said you were in a lion morph sculpted to look like Lionhart, and Flash had a friend in traffic control track you.  Then Finnick mentioned the place was owned by Nine Lives.”

 

“You, owe, us.”  Flash cut in as the buggy started to drive off.  “There’s, a, backup, of, your, muse, on, my, drive.”  A panel on the dashboard opened, revealing a datajack cable.  Nick groaned, felt for the port on the back of his neck and plugged the cable in.

 

A loading bar appeared in his entoptic display for a few minutes, then Jack appeared in his field of view looking annoyed.  [Seriously Nick? You go out and next thing I hear Proxy Glitter is looking for you, then word all over the Eye is that you’ve been captured and I’m playing damage control with your Rep.]

 

[Damn, how bad did I get hit?]  In the post-scarcity economy of the Autonomists one’s reputation was everything, conveniently quantified by social networks like Circle-A.  Even in the hypercapitalist inner system a low Rep score on CivicNet could kill a deal before it had even started. And Firewall’s extremely encrypted anonymous network, The Eye, had it’s own Rep system for prioritizing the conspiracy’s limited resources towards those who could be trusted to use them well.  And not, for instance, to let themselves get caught and interrogated for sensitive information.

 

[I limited the damage to two points,] Jack replied.  [But you owe level 4 favors to each of your cell members, and a second one to Fst_Nml for disabling the Optogenetics module in your current sleeve and draining the syndicate’s local accounts to reimburse you for the failed scam.]

 

[Optogenetics, huh, explains the whole “paralyzing fear” thing and how it came and went so quickly.]  Those were serious favors, but manageable. [Let me know next time Finnick needs to hide a body. How much did Flash get us?]

 

[20K, average market price for a Heirloom morph like you were trying to pass that thing off as.  Shall I distribute the profits as originally planned?]

 

[No,] Nick replied.  [Even a small branch of Nine Lives would have had at least five times that money.  Flash probably gave the rest to Firewall already. Giving it all to  _ Inconveniently Tied _ should bump our @-Rep up eight or nine points.]  The exhausted vulpine laid back in his seat, willing the sex switch bioware to start the hormonal and physiological shifts to change the sleeve to male.  After a few minutes of rest and staring out the one-way window at the passing Mares landscape he suddenly remembered something. [Wait, you and Ethie said that the Proxy wanted me for something.  She tell you anything?]

 

[There was a sealed message for you, but I thought it best if you had a chance to catch your breath before opening it.]  A message icon appeared in Nick’s display, with the flags of Firewall’s security measures. Tentatively he brought the message up and started applying the keys one by one, password, Ego print, other password, code token…

 

**From: Proxy Glitter**

 

**To: Sentinel Kitsune**

 

**Agent, it has no doubt come to your attention that a former close associate of yours has recently been re-instanced and indentured to Direct Action.  Myself and a few of my colleagues suspect that she might become a useful asset to our organization. You are to observe her from a distance and take note of any deviations from normal behavior.**

 

**You are not to attempt to recruit her yourself.  You are not to try to liberate her from her indenture.  You are not to initiate contact of any sort. If she contacts you try not to reveal your identity or your affiliation.**

 

**Remember, the continued survival of Transmammalkind depends on operational security.  The Fall cannot be allowed to happen again.**

 

Nick paused to digest the information.  Was he really being asked to spy on Judy?  Something about that seemed to irk him, but he couldn’t quite remember why.  “Well, this should be an interesting mission.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Judy has her first assignment on a new world, in a new body, in a new life.
> 
> Shortly after, she starts to realize that something strange is happening to her, and somebody has taken an unhealthy interest in her.

After a month of retraining and acclimatization to her new sleeve, including a crash course on the differences between Old Zootopia’s laws and the hypercorporate Species Consortium’s, Judy was assigned to rotating security duties around the business districts of Valles- New Zootopia.  It would give her a chance to see the largest domed canyon-city on mammalkind’s designated new homeworld, while also allowing potential FauxFur customers maximum visibility of the morph she modeled. She had to admit it was less degrading than parking duty.

 

One week into her assignment Judy was emplaced at the door to one of FauxFur’s clinics.  A dozen mammals of different shapes and sizes passed by her without comment, a couple staring at her as she scrutinized their AR passes, but pointedly trying not to make eye contact with her.  Close to noon she noticed a small family of russet-furred bunnies walking slowly in her direction, discussing something among themselves. Curious, Judy examined the family, a mother and father and three kits of different ages, she knew that urban lapines often used hormonal therapies to reduce litter sizes, if they didn’t simply get neutered after one litter, but they also spoke and acted like country bunnies.  The father and the oldest kit, a teenager from the looks of him, also seemed to walk more stiffly, as if they’d developed arthritis decades early. She scanned their AR passes, the father had one identifying them as arriving for Genetic Service Packs.

 

[Skye, what are Genetic Service Packs?]  She asked her muse.

 

Less than a second later Skye replied, [they appear to be sleeved in Ruster morphs.  As Mares will be fully terraformed eventually the less expensive Ruster phenotypes have Planned Obsolescence built into their genomes.  Without tri-monthly gene therapies known as “Genetic Service Packs” their musculature begins to degenerate. Such Rusters are also usually sterilized, requiring potential parents to order their children from the parent company.]

 

[And the kits are born with that condition?  That’s horrible!] Judy’s face momentarily twisted into an expression of disgust and fury, before she remembered where she was and how she was supposed to look affable.  She listened to the family’s conversation, pulled up a map to the gene therapy suites and called over to them. “Excuse me, sir, ma’am? If you’re here for GSPs I have directions.”

 

The father tried to object but his wife practically ran over towards her.  “Oh bless you, we normally go to another clinic closer to our terraforming station but it was closed down earlier this month.”  As she came closer Judy was once again struck by how much taller she was now, the other rabbit was maybe half her height. 

 

_ Was this what Nick felt like around me? _  She wondered.   _ No, he was always that size, it was right for him. _  Judy held out an AR file with step-by-step directions to the GSP clinic that would work even if their access to the local Mesh was restricted.  As the mother took the file Judy decided to add another set of files. “Oh, your kits will need access passes too.” She tagged all five of them with icons that would give them priority access to the elevators and moving walkways on their route.

 

The teenager examined his icon for a minute with a suspicious look.  “What, is this some kind of publicity stunt?” He asked loudly.

 

“Huh?”  Judy exclaimed, confused.  “No, I was just trying to be nice, is all.”

 

“So you feel sorry for us, do you?”  He accused. “The heroic bunny cop gets a shiny new morph but you pity the poor rednecks with bodies that are literally falling apart, is that it?”

 

Judy was trying to formulate a response when the youngest of the family piped up.  “You’re really Judy Hopps?”

 

Judy looked down at the kit, who couldn’t have been much older than six.  “Yes, yes I am. What’s your name?”

 

“Sally.”  The kit replied.  “If you’re Judy Hopps, what are you doing guarding a clinic?”

 

“Well,” Judy said.  “This sleeve was pretty expensive, I have to do what Direct Action and FauxFur want me to do until I’ve paid it off.”

 

The teenager cocked a disbelieving eyebrow at her while his middle sibling tried to hide behind their mother and the youngest asked another question.  “How much does it cost to be so tall?”

 

Judy’s face fell at the question.  “I’m contractually obligated to say that in 18 months FauxFur’s first production series will be ready for purchase at 50,000 credits per unit.  But personally, I think that if you ever have that much money you’d be better off buying a couple of premium Rusters for you and one of your siblings.”

 

“Oh,” the kit looked a little disappointed.  She and the rest of her family walked off following the route Judy had given them.  As they left Judy noted that one of the passers-by on the other side of the street had stopped to watch the whole exchange.  A scruffy coyote who didn’t look like he was coming over for gene therapy. He saw her look his way and walked off in a smooth motion that looked strangely familiar.  Judy made a note to watch for him again.

\---

Kitsune: She spoke to a family of redneck bunnies today, looked like the size difference between her Fury and their Rusters made her feel a bit dysmorphic.  Teenager seemed like a bit of a young Leosoomian and maybe some of his statements got her feeling uncomfortable too. Seemed pretty nice to them though, except when the indenture forced her otherwise.  I’ve got XP.

Glitter: Good to hear that she still has a soft spot for cubs.  Though, this possibility of dysmorphia might pose a problem. I want you to keep observing her for a couple months.

Kitsune: Not the worst mission you’ve given me.

\---

Over the next month and a half Judy noticed that same flowing gait on a dozen different morphs, ranging from Splicers to Pods, covering species from pachyderms to rodents.  She saw someone who moved that way almost every day at least once on her patrols, no matter where she was assigned. After the first month it seemed to click in her mind, she was being stalked by a single person with access to a wide range of pods, but who might that be?

 

Most individuals wouldn’t be able to afford daily resleeving, even if he, and she was certain that he was a he despite wearing a few female sleeves, was merely renting rather than buying them.  So unless he was some rich kid with a fixation on her it was unlikely he was following her for his own purposes, he was probably working for some larger organization providing an expense account.  That left three possibilities: first that he could be a journalist, plausible given that she’d already spoken to dozens of reporters already since her resurrection. Second most likely was that he was a spy sent from corporate to keep tabs on her, that could prove problematic, she’d already been written up once for providing that family with special access passes, too many bad marks on her record and she’d be looking at a few extra years on her indenture.  The third possibility she didn’t like to entertain, but, as Skye searched for and failed to find any information on the first two it started to look more and more likely.

 

Two weeks after concluding that she had a stalker, Judy requisitioned a shock baton, a laser pulser, and a full coverage suit of body armor.

 

She was patrolling the entertainment district that day, given the criminal element her precautions seemed reasonable.  She spent three hours sidling past holo-ads for virtual casinos, Pleasure Pods waiting outside their brothels for potential clients, and AR samples of the year’s popular films.  Eventually she spotted him, wearing a doe Splicer and pretending to be interested in one of the casinos.

 

Now was the time, Judy pretended to notice something in a nearby alley and ducked into it.  Upon entering she looked around and spotted a ledge three and a half meters above the ground that could provide cover, with a few quick leaps and bounces off the walls she was crouched up there in wait.

 

The stalker came in a few minutes later, looking around in confusion, quickly turning to desperation as he frantically searched for his quarry.  Judy saw her chance when he bent over to examine a sewer grate. She leapt down, landing expertly behind him, and tapped the end of her pulser on his shoulder.

 

“Don’t move.”  She cautioned as he tensed up.  “You’re going to answer a couple of questions for me, and then I don’t want to see you following me again.”

 

“What?”  The doe exclaimed.  “What are you talking about?”

 

“You’ve been following me for over a month.”  Judy stated, prodding the pulser into him again.  “You might change your body, species, and sex, but you still walk the same way.  That much resleeving isn’t cheap so who’s footing your bill?”

 

“I…” he looked crestfallen.  “I don’t know, exactly, it was all anonymous.  Could have been anyone really.”

 

“Not anyone.”  Judy replied. “There’s only so many organizations with that sort of money who would be interested in me.  So, who do you think it was? Direct Action? The Bigs? Nine Lives?”

 

She noticed a shudder at the name of the last gang.  “No, I would never work for them. Not ever. It may have been one of the Big family, they’re certainly rich enough.”

 

“One might hope.”  She said in response.  “But you don’t know for sure.  And you wouldn’t want those monsters to have information on some little bunny cop now would you?”  Judy caught a hint of his eyes rolling so she pressed a little harder. “So here’s what’s going to happen.  In a couple seconds I’m going to withdraw the laser, then you’re going to leave and tell your client that you’re dropping the gig and we never see each other again.  Understand?”

 

The one in a deer morph nodded.  Judy withdrew the pulser and holstered it as he walked away.  “Hard as ever Carrots.” He commented.

 

“Wait, what did you just call me?”  Judy asked, shock creeping into her voice.  With a start, the deer ran out across the street before she could ask anything else.

\---

Kitsune: She recognized me.

Glitter: What?!

Kitsune: Well, I don’t think she knew who I was, exactly, but she figured out that I was following her this whole time.  She learned my kinesics, my body language that passes from sleeve to sleeve.

Glitter: Do you think you can continue the mission?

Kitsune: Only if you can get me a sleeve with Gait Masking ‘ware.  Otherwise I’d have Fst_Nml take over.

Glitter: He’s already running overwatch.  I have a Shaper available.

Kitsune: A Shaper?  I’ve been looking for one of those, sure I’ll take it.

\---

Ozma field report: Subject Carrotfarmer.

The target has identified the suspected enemy agent that was tailing her.  She displayed a level of kinesic recognition not previously documented in this subject.  This combined with the information supplied by the fork we obtained and her actions during retraining lead us to suspect she is indeed infected.

 

Project Ozma to field agents: Subject Carrotfarmer.

Prepare to abduct target.  Be ready to act on our command.

\---

Judy didn’t see any sign of her stalker for the next two weeks, but she kept hold of the equipment just in case.  It was a fairly peaceful half-month, with only a couple incidents with petty troublemakers, up until one night at the monorail station.  

 

The building was pressurized and the trains entered through sealed tubes that separated the vast open space into sections, but the teeming mass of mammals reminded her of Old Zootopia’s Grand Central station.  She wondered idly if it was still standing back on Sky Ark, whether any of the trains had survived the antimatter bombs and orbital kinetic strikes intended to slow down the TITAN war machines.

 

A group of maintenance mammals, two wolves and a wolverine, ducked into a hatch near Judy’s post.  For some reason, she took a particular notice of them, though she couldn’t quite say why. She listened as they closed the door behind them and started banging loudly on something.  Eventually, she heard something very large and metallic crash and one of the wolves poked his head out shortly after. “Hey, you there,” he called over in her direction. “Think you could give us a hand with this?”

 

Judy looked back at him quizzically, “I’m not supposed to leave my post.”

 

“It’ll only take a minute.”  The wolf pleaded. “We just need some help lifting this one thing.  You have muscular augmentations right?”

 

The 1.3 meter tall bunny looked down at the toned muscles of her still new arm, even after a quarter year it didn’t feel quite right.  With a sigh, she replied. “I suppose I might as well get some good use out of this thing.” She walked off towards the door and followed the wolf in.

 

The tunnel was surprisingly spacious, it looked like a grizzly bear might be able to stand up without hitting the ceiling.  She was starting to wonder why they didn’t just bring a bear with them. “How much further is it?” She asked.

 

“A ways down still.”  The wolf replied. “A section of pipe came loose in the basement levels.”  He pointed up at a half-meter wide pipe running along the wall by means of explanation.  They went down what felt like two floors before catching up to the other wolf and the wolverine.  Judy’s guide stepped aside for her to pass and she took a look around, no sign of a fallen pipe anywhere.

 

“Where’s the problem, here…”  As soon as Judy stepped past the wolf moved to block her exit and a quicksilver-like fluid flowed up from under all three “maintenance” mammals’ collars.  The wolverine started to reach into his pocket.

 

_ The wolverine drew a slim weapon and fired straight at Judy’s heart. _

 

Judy leaped into the air just as the wolverine fired an electrolaser stunner into the space her body had occupied milliseconds earlier.  She didn’t stop to think how she had seen the attack coming as she bounced off the wolf next to him, sending him reeling as she flew into the open air.

 

[Activate neurachem.]  Judy mentally triggered the streamlined neurons and amped-up neurotransmitters of her bioengineered sleeve and time seemed to slow down.  She drew her pulser and fired a stun bolt at the wolf who’d led her down as his hand inched towards his own weapon. The first laser pulse generated a plasma sphere on the glittering surface covering his head, and the second pulse detonated the plasma with the force of a concussion grenade.

 

The wolverine managed to raise an arm to shield his eyes from the blast.  Then, moving with what looked like normal speed to Judy’s accelerated time sense he snapped off a shot at her again.  Counting on him to be disoriented, the rabbit failed to twist out of the way in time and caught the electrified beam on the leg.  She crashed into a twitching heap on the floor.

 

“You’re not the only one here who managed to get themselves a Fury, little bunny.”  The wolverine snarled, keeping the stunner trained on her paralyzed form. “Orders were for a live capture if possible.  But now I’m starting to think we should be going for as loose a definition of “alive” as possible.” He flexed his claws, now covered with the quicksilver that was rapidly hardening into an armored bodysuit, and began to reach for her neck.

 

Judy tried to will her numb limbs into moving again, only managing a few weak twitches.  She looked around in desperation for some way to escape her situation, the wolf she’d stunned was still dazed but the other had sprung back to his feet and was walking closer to her, presumably to help his compatriot tear her cortical stack out.  The bunny found her hand still locked around her pulser like a vise and she concentrated, trying to will her fingers to move. Slowly, her thumb inched the setting switch from “stun” to “kill”, only for a smartmetal coated paw to push it down to the floor.

 

The wolf standing on her started to laugh in amusement at her helplessness, only to be cut short by the barks of gunfire.  He toppled over as tungsten-carbide darts tore through his thin nanotech coating. Judy gasped under the weight of the dying wolf on top of her, feeling jolting back into her limbs she strained to lift him off of her body.  She heard a second burst of gunfire take out the other wolf.

 

The wolverine turned his electrolaser in the direction of the kinetic shots.  In the moment he was distracted Judy managed to swing her own laser out and strike him with a burning pulse that seared into his nanoarmor.  The liquid metal shifted to cover the burn and he swung out at her with his claws.

 

_ Four inch-long scythes ripped for her center of mass. _

 

Judy ducked the swipe and kicked at the wolverine’s kneecap.  He twisted in time to limit the damage and telegraphed another slash that the bunny easily dodged again.  She leapt upwards to strike him on the jaw and forced him to stagger back.

 

As soon as there was half a meter separating the two of them a storm of bullets shredded the wolverine.  Judy glanced over to see a small canid figure holding a bucking holdout railgun pistol until the magazine ran out.  With two swift motions the figure popped the clip out and inserted a second.

 

The bunny turned back to the bullet-riddled wolverine, starting to teeter over.  She returned to her erstwhile savior as he began to take aim again. “That’s enough!  He’s dead already.”

 

The mysterious canid watched the metal-clad mustelid collapse before holstering his gun.  “When you’ve seen the scat I’ve seen, you learn to make sure.” As he started to walk over to the nearest wolf Judy noticed that he walked with an irregular stagger, as if he were unsure of his footing.

 

“Are you alright?”  She asked.

 

“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine.  He hit me with the shock-beam but my jacket is insulated.”  He drew and unfolded a memory polymer knife before crouching down next to the corpse.  To Judy’s shock he plunged it straight into the back of the dead wolf’s head.

 

She dashed over, yelling “what are you doing?” as she reached to stop him.

 

The odd canid looked up at her, “getting their stacks so we can find out who sent them, obviously.  Or at least I would if this sleeve had a stack,” he dug out a chunk of flesh and spinal column and showed it to her, no sign of cyberware.  “It would seem their employer didn’t want to risk them blabbing. But maybe their leader with the big expensive Fury wasn’t beholden to the same security precautions.”  He stood back up and started to walk towards the wolverine.

 

Judy moved to keep in front of the stranger as he walked.  Glancing down, she started to notice that his gait was shifting in slight ways, tendons and muscles in his legs actually changing shape.  Looking back up at his face it seemed like some of the bone structure and fat deposits were migrating and his fur was slowly turning from gray to red.  To her knowledge, those sorts of changes on the fly required three different types of implant, one of which was illegal. “You’re using gait-masking nanoware, aren’t you?”  She suddenly accused.

 

He shook his head in a show of annoyance.  “I knew I should have waited for the transition to finish before coming to help you.”  Something in Judy’s head clicked as she saw his body language up close, through the mask he presented some small bit slipped through that she recognized instantly.

 

“You again!”  Judy shouted. “You liar, you said I’d never see you again!  I am bringing you in for harassing a state employee and possession of…”  She paused, her ears catching a minuscule click from the supposedly dead wolverine behind her.

 

_ The wolverine plunged his claws into her back and yanked her into his waiting jaws. _

 

_ The wolverine exploded in a ball of white-hot plasma. _

 

_ The wolverine dissolved into a seething boil of disassembler nanobots. _

 

“Move!”  Before any of the potential futures she visualized could come to pass Judy leapt into the stranger, throwing them both to the floor two meters from the corpse moments before its’ head exploded.  Shards of bone and steaming gray matter rained down on the two of them. When it seemed to have stopped Judy shrugged the animal debris off her armored bodysuit and dared to open her eyes, finding herself gazing up into the increasingly vulpine mammal’s strikingly familiar green eyes.

 

The fox turned away with a start, glancing back at the headless carcass.  “Emergency farcaster,” he assessed wryly. “Antimatter powered so… single-use as you can see.  Got away.” He sighed.

 

Judy decided then that she had enough of this mysterious mammal.  First he had stalked her for two months, then after warned him to stop he continued with the aid of banned nanotech.  After that he killed two mammals, possibly permanently, without even batting an eye. And now he was annoyed that the third mammal he’d shot had killed himself to avoid capture?  She gripped him firmly on both sides of his head and rotated it to face her directly. “Who. Are. You?!”

 

As she shouted her anger and frustration were converted into an electric current that flowed down her arms into the canid’s skull, probing his brain for the answers she sought.  One spark found something and streamed back into her, carrying with it the name she was looking for.  _ Nicholas Piberius Wilde. _

 

“Nick?”  She whispered, unbelieving.  Why would he do all this? Why wouldn’t he simply speak to her if he wanted to re-establish contact?  Didn’t he remember that he could trust her?

 

Her sparks of consciousness searched for the times they had tested each other’s trust in them over their decades as partners.  The confession in the gondola, the press conference, the Bellwether hustle, the Sahara Square shootout, all she found were wisps and fragments of memories intentionally forgotten.  How could this happen? Why would he forget?

 

_ “I thought you said you would take care of all of them?”  He was asking the holographic avatar of an AGI psychosurgeon who represented themself as a large glowing brain. _

 

_ “I did what I could.”  The sapient program answered.  “If I deleted any more memories your psyche would unravel.  Several divergent forks of your Ego did fall apart in fact, you were the most stable result.” _

 

_ “I remember those rutting bastards mutilating me on life support, sleeving me in feral Howler addicts and throwing me in gladiatorial fights, locking me in a box for a year, raping me!”  Nick poked an accusing finger through the psychosurgeon’s hologram. “What worse torments could Nine Lives have done to me?” _

 

_ The AGI shifted its projection out of Nick’s way.  “It would probably be best for your rehabilitation if you didn’t know.  But I would advise you find any friends of yours from before you were captured, there’s a strong chance at least some of the memories I erased were entangled with good memories.  Your friends might help you recover them.” _

 

Judy stared in shock at what had become of her old friend.  What could those Ego-traffickers have done to warrant Nick losing the memories of the times they had together?  “Oh, Nick.” She said, “there’s so much you’ve forgotten. If only I could have been there for you sooner.”

 

Nick’s pupils narrowed as he listened.  “What? How could you, oh, oh no.” He started to reach for his pocket as a single word raced across his mind.   _ Exsurgent! _

 

The bunny foresaw the shot and reacted quickly enough that his bullet penetrated her shoulder instead of her chest.  Leaping away she stared at him with hurt in her eyes, clutching the wound he’d given her.

 

The fox leapt to his feet and spun around, leveling his gun at the thing that had been his partner in a previous life.  His face a mask of sheer terror at the thought of what she had become.

 

They stared at each other, betrayal and fear, neither of them willing to make the next move.  They stood there for what seemed like ages before the sound of heavy footsteps came thumping down the hall where they had both come from.

 

Nick stepped cautiously back, keeping his eyes on Judy for nearly a dozen paces before turning and running at full tilt down the opposite direction of the approaching newcomers.

 

Judy let herself collapse as Direct Action mercenaries in SWAT gear formed a perimeter around the crime scene and a Dr. Bot rolled up to tend to her injuries.  _ What is happening to me? _

\---

A couple hours later, Nick laid back on an examination table as another Dr. Bot completed its examination.  While it retracted its probes Ethel’s voice, broadcast from her clinic in high orbit, came over the speakers and stated: “No sign of infection, seems we won’t need to kill you after all.”

 

“Well that’s a relief.”  Nick slipped his paws out of the straps that began to loosen automatically with the diagnosis.  “You know how ticked our proxy gets when we lose a good sleeve like this.”

 

“You seem to be taking the news that Judy might be an Exsurgent fairly well.”  Ethel noted. “She was your partner after all.”

 

“She’s not anymore.  And there’s no “if” about it.  She’s developed kinesics that could penetrate the best nanoware Furotic can design, see a bullet coming before it’s fired, and then she rifled through my brain without even touching my firewalls.”

 

“Nick,” a teleoperated foam paddle held him on the table.  “She might still be salvageable. Glitter’s given me access to a lot of information on the Exsurgent virus and she’s been instanced long enough for Wools-MacLion to run its course and go dormant.”

 

The fox shapeshifter snorted, “explains why so many proxies and sentinels are willing to give that kind of Exsurgent the benefit of the doubt.”

 

“Wools-MacLion patients aren’t Exsurgents, they’re just asyncs.”

 

“Same thing.”

 

“No,” the otter used the paddle to shove him down and keep him there.  “Not every Exsurgent strain results in Psi abilities and Wools-MacLion doesn’t control its’ hosts like the other strains.”

 

Nick wriggled beneath the foam extension.  “Yeah, it just drives them insane.”

 

“You reported that she exhibited some body dysmorphia, that’s been documented as a result of Wools-MacLion but it’s treatable just like the normal version.”

 

“Expensively if she stays on this capitalist planet.”  Nick squeezed his way out from under his constraint and slid to the floor.  As he started to head out he had one last nagging thought. “Hey, do those secret files of yours happen to mention what asyncs can do with memories?”

 

There was a pause before Ethel answered.  “There is a psi-chi sleight that grants the async eidetic memory.  There are also gamma-level sleights that allow asyncs to read the memories of other biomorphs and copy their own memories into another mammal.  However,” she cautioned, “there are some unverified reports that Exsurgent asyncs might be able to erase memories or implant false ones.”

 

“I figured as much.”  Nick strolled out the door to the remote lab, trying not to contemplate the ramifications of the past day’s events.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After surviving an encounter with mysterious kidnappers, Judy is reassigned to a wilderness patrol where hopefully she'll be out of sight.
> 
> But, that doesn't quite preclude the possibility of other things taking notice of her.

“I know what you’re all thinking.”  The briefing, as it were, was being given by a Mares Ranger sleeved in an “Alpiner” morph polar bear.  “You’re here thinking that this post will be taking potshots at decade-old Warbots and Headhunters, allow me to disabuse you of that ridiculous notion.”

 

Judy, sitting in the front row, couldn’t help but be reminded of the drill sergeant she’d had at the police academy back in Old Zootopia.  Harold Wolford had advised sending her to the TITAN Quarantine Zone on the grounds that it would be the last place on Mares that her stalkers in New Zootopia would be willing to look for her.  And some idiot in marketing thought XP of her in action against feral war machines might make good publicity shots for the lagomorph Fury.

 

“The big machines are a vanishingly small percentage of what you’ll see out there.  You’re more likely to run into mammal treasure hunters and thrill-seekers than anything the TITANs made.  But, if you do run into any of their scat it’ll probably be the little things. Smartmines, nanoswarms, tentacled monsters that may have been mammals once…”  The bunny perked up in surprise at that last comment, exactly what did she mean by that? “If you do happen to encounter any grey goo or fractals, you’re better off just calling in a kinetic than trying to fight them on your own.  Now, how many of you are sleeved in Rusters or Alpiners?” About half the room raised their hands, Judy wasn’t one of them, her Fury would be in a vac-suit the whole rotation. “You’ll probably be tempted to take your helmet off for a nice fresh breath of dusty air.   _ Don’t _ .  The TITANs pumped all kinds of nasty viruses and toxins into the local atmosphere that will kill you, filtered lungs or not, if you’re lucky.”

 

Judy had considered asking the Ranger if she knew anything about “Exsurgents”, but now, she was thinking that she didn’t want to know.

\---

Project Ozma command to TQZ embed:

An employee of Direct Action that we have been observing for a time has been confirmed to be compromised and in contact with our opposition.  Arrange for her to have an “accident”. The use of WMDs is authorized.

\---

As the patrol buggy crossed over the line into the TQZ Judy thought she noticed a change in the terrain outside her transparent aluminum window.  Physically, it was ungrounded, the place was equally deserted to either side of the line of warning beacons, the ground dotted with craters of nuclear glass and the otherworldly pitting produced by disassembler nano.  But, she felt a difference in her heart, a sense of foreboding and looming terror.

 

She looked around at her squad-mates again.  A rhino named “Rhinestone”, carrying a plasma rifle in each meaty hand, a leopard who called themself “Pardus”, their field commander, and a coyote by the moniker of “Huey”, their sensor tech.  Judy checked the safety on her particle bolter nervously, hoping for an uneventful patrol.

 

It was several hours before they came across the first sign of the past horrors that had transpired in this place.  A squadron of semi-anthropomorphic Warbots, toppled over and sprawled over a large clearing apparently during the Fall.  They took one quick check for scavengers or live threats, then moved on from the giant metallic carcasses.

 

As they were passing by Judy noticed what seemed to be a series of mammal skeletons, most of them still intact, chained around the waist of the nearest warbot like a gruesome belt.  Her curiosity getting the better of her, she asked what those were for.

 

Pardus answered her.  “The TITANs didn’t just know how to use robots and railguns against mammals, they were masters of psychological warfare.  Whatever intelligences were piloting those mechs knew that they were big targets, so they would sometimes scoop up a few refugees and strap them over their machines’ vital areas.  Troops fighting to drive them off would need to shoot through screaming innocents in order to bring them down.” Seeing the bunny’s eyes widen as she realized the implications of the belt of bones, they added, “they did what they had to do.”

 

They’d slowed to recharge their suits’ batteries and eat a few ration bars twice, Huey showing considerable relief not to rely on his suit’s integral maker for calories, before coming across the next sign of TITAN activity.  The coyote called for a halt in the middle of a barren plain and pointed at what seemed at first like just another patch of dirt and dust. “Catimir perturbance, I’m sure of it. Look at the dust in the air.”

 

Judy scrutinized the spot Huey was indicating, it did seem like the airborne dust was slightly less thick above it, but she wasn’t sure that meant anything.  At her uncomprehending expression the coyote stepped out of the buggy and picked up a rock. It sailed through the air for ten meters before hitting the edge of the “perturbance” as Huey had called it, then it swung straight down and buried itself in the ground.

 

“Seed AI figured out how to mess with gravity.”  Huey commented as he leapt back into the vehicle and passed a nanodetector over his suit.  “If we could figure out how they did it the space elevator and Bouncer morphs would be obsolete.”  He went back to his sensor feeds as Rhinestone set a course around the anomaly. “Lucky we didn’t run into one of the ones that toss you 10 meters into the air.”

 

As the first day started to come to a close, Judy was beginning to get her hopes up that they wouldn’t run into any TITAN enemies, just their remains and weird environmental hazards.  But, just as the sun was beginning to set they spotted a trail leading off towards the border. The trail formed a path of perfectly smooth ground 3 meters wide, completely without wear.  “Damnit”, Pardus swore. “Huey, can you tell me if it was a nanoswarm or a Fractal that did this?”

 

The coyote puzzled over his instruments.  “Not from over here. If I got in close I might be able to tell what made that trail and how recently.”

 

“And how close it might be to civilization now.”  The leopard nodded towards the rhino. “Rhinestone, cover him, if we’re lucky we can get a satellite view on it in time to stop it.”  They started to call in to headquarters as the coyote and rhino stepped out of the buggy and walked over to the trail.

 

Huey swung a mini-radar scanner over the edges of the trail, Rhinestone pointing his plasma rifles off in the distance towards the edge of the TQZ, where their quarry had supposedly fled.  After a minute the sensor tech called over to them with his findings. “Uniformity of the trail seems to suggest it was either a Fractal or a very densely-packed nanoswarm, can’t say for certain.  The computer thinks from the dust drifting in from the edges that this trail was made no more than 15 minutes ago.”

 

“That’s some good news,” Pardus noted.  “It would still be in the Quarantine Zone then.  Satellite tracking is locking onto the trail from here and we should have a kinetic kill shot lined up in five minutes.”

 

All while her teammates were discussing this, Judy kept her eyes locked on the TITAN trail leading off in the distance.  Something about it didn’t seem quite right for some reason, but she couldn’t put her finger on it. Huey took a step onto the nano-worn trail itself for another scan.

 

_ The ground burst open and an indescribable black horror leapt up to envelop the unsuspecting canid. _

 

Judy lifted her particle bolter and leveled it towards the trail with her right hand while priming an EMP grenade with her left.  “Huey, Rhine, get out of there now!” She shouted over the squad radio.

 

The coyote looked back at the buggy in confusion.  “Huh? What’s going… AIEEE!” A dozen tiny arms that branched out into a hundred smaller arms branching into a thousand appendages too small to see with the naked eye reached out of the glassy soil and wrapped around Huey’s feet.  His screams of terror and pain as the fractal’s microscopic digits shredded his suit and skin at the molecular level overwhelmed the channel.

 

Stunned by what was happening to his teammate, Rhinestone hesitated long enough for Huey to topple over into the rest of the bush-like robot as it emerged from its hiding place under the carefully arranged soil.  Finally coming to his senses, the rhino fired off two quick bursts from each of his plasma rifles into the Fractal and its victim, vaporizing several branches and silencing the coyote’s agonized shrieking.

 

Rhinestone’s plasma rifles smoked and shuddered as they tried to radiate the waste heat from their barrels, but their cooling systems were not fast enough to save their owner as the fractal lunged towards the rhino.  Microscopic digits disassembled the hands holding the weapons and lifted them away as the robotic monster began to consume its next victim.

 

“Hold on Rhine!”  Judy chucked the EMP grenade in her hand at the fractal and it burst less than a meter from the branching limbs.  The bunny looked away from the bright flash of light and electromagnetic energy for a moment, then looked back hoping to see the horrible nanotech falling away from the unfortunate patrolmammal.

 

The rhino was still in the grasp of the Fractal horror and it was advancing, the EMP had no effect.

 

“Hopps you fool!”  Pardus shouted, jumping into the driver’s seat.  “It’s not a nanoswarm, the whole thing is hardwired.  All you did was short out our radios.” The leopard grabbed the manual controls to the buggy and slammed the accelerator down, steering far away from the horrifying sight behind them.

 

They hadn’t made it five meters when their rear wheels exploded in a plasma burst from Rhinestone’s rifles, now appropriated by the fractal.  The buggy bucked, them slammed into the ground hard, dragging behind them. Pardus took their feet off the pedals and threw open the door, Judy couldn’t bring herself to move.

 

The day of the Fall flashed before the rabbit’s eyes again and again.  A crowd of terrified people eaten alive, molecule by molecule, with no one to help them.  But this time, nothing they could do would even slow down the nanotechnological monstrosity.

 

“Come on!”  The leopard shouted, beckoning to Judy.  “They’ll be carpeting this location with kinetics in…”  They were cut off abruptly by the burst of plasma vaporizing their head.

 

Judy glanced idly out the window, the Fractal was approaching rapidly, seeming to float on the ends of its microscopic limbs even as it “digested” its prior two victims.  “This is it.” She thought. “At least my backup won’t remember this.” But as she slumped over in her chair to die, her eyes chanced upon a small box under one of the other seats.

 

It was sealed with yellow and black tape, but Judy decided there wasn’t much point obeying safety rules at this point.  Curious, she slit the tape and swung the box open, inside was a small steel sphere with a white-filled circle surrounded by a black ring painted under the standard nuclear material warning symbol.  She allowed a small grin to cross her face.

 

The bunny picked up the detonator and flipped it over in her hands, trying to figure out how to set it.  It looked like a fairly standard remote, but there was no sign of an antenna or access jack. The proton-antiproton weapon itself showed no sign of an interface either, just a smooth metal sphere with only the warning markings standing out.

 

She was still trying to set it when the Fractal tore open the back of the buggy as if it were tinfoil.  A digit-studded branch began to reach for her, then stopped, spotting the device sitting on the seat next to her it plunged every one of its limbs in the car down towards the antimatter bomb.  But, to her surprise it wasn’t trying to disassemble it, if anything it was building onto it, wrapping it in a dense black material that sparked and fizzled as it was spread across the surface of the bomb.  At first Judy was frustrated that it was denying the weapon to her, but after it didn’t even attempt to attack her for several seconds she started to consider again that she might be able to escape alive. With a glance back at the door Pardus had left open she realized that she had an opportunity to escape now.

 

Particle rifle in hand Judy leapt straight out the door, from the outside she was able to spot the rest of the massive bush-like construct, while the branches inside the vehicle were preoccupied with the bomb those on the “back” were fusing together Rhinestone’s two plasma rifles into a single large device with two barrels.  Before it could be turned to aim at her the bunny activated her neurachem and ran a particle bolt through the weapon, ignoring its’ diffuse wielder. She only watched long enough to see the first wisps of smoke trail out of the plasma weapon’s barrels before turning and running pell-mell out into the wilderness.

 

Judy kept running for what felt like miles, ducking around sand dunes and cliffs, before she even tried to get her bearings.  With her mesh antennas shorted out by the EMP she couldn’t connect to GPS satellites or call for help. She would need to attempt navigation the “old-fashioned way”.  She slowed to a stop and looked around, nothing visible but open desert all around and not a cloud in the sky. The sun dropping over the horizon was clearly visible, she could recall that they had come into the TQZ from the south so logically she would want to go perpendicular and to the left of the setting sun, but she’d been wandering around for hours, would that still be the shortest route back to civilization?

 

The bunny was still contemplating that issue when a blazing fireball streaked across the sky, making the ground shake with a sonic boom as it passed.  Without thinking she dove to the ground and began burrowing vigorously, hollowing out a crawl space just before the directed meteor tossed a wall of soil into the air.

 

In her panic she didn’t even notice the giant metal dragonfly zipping around the sky 50 meters above her.

\---

Turning away from the plume of destruction Nick beat his synth wings furiously as he flew.  Within minutes he found Finnick, sleeved in a large six-limbed Synthtaur based loosely on a maned wolf.  Landing his meter-long Dragonfly body on the larger synth’s lower back he explained the situation. “They ran into a Fractal ambush back that way.”  He reported. “Her teammates all got killed but she got out and ran away. The kinetic would have buried her though.”

 

His friend rotated his large-eared robotic head around to stare at him.  “Any chance she survived?”

 

Nick shrugged as much as his insectile body would allow.  “I’d say it’s pretty slim, she was trying to dig a burrow last I saw but she’d have to be ludicrously fast in order to get a thick enough roof over her head.”

 

“She was fast as a Flat.  Now she’s got augmented muscles and neurachem.”  Finnick turned his massive body around in the direction Nick had come from and began walking.  “Wire me the coordinates, at the very least we can try to dig up her stack.”

 

Nick crawled up Finnick’s upper torso to the access jacks built into his neck.  But he hesitated before connecting to him and transferring the data. “Are we sure we need to?”  He asked nervously.

 

Finnick stopped dead in his tracks, then swiftly swung one arm back and grabbed Nick by the thorax and held him directly in front of his face.  “What is up with you Nicky?” He shouted angrily. “You’ve been looking for excuses not to come near a mammal who was closer than blood to you before the Fall happened.  Is it because she’s an async now? Or does she just bring up some painful memories you thought you’d deleted?”

 

“Wha…?”  Nick flailed his insectoid limbs uselessly against the Synthtaur’s grasping fingers.  “We were really that close?”

 

“Yes Nick.”  The robotic fennec shook the fox in a bug.  “Ever since you graduated from fuzz school the two of you were inseparable.  You actually opened up to her, remember that time we got drunk and you let slip about the whole Junior Explorer thing?”

 

Nick let out a simulated groan.  “Yes, I remember that. I also remember that I never told that story to anyone else, ever.”

 

“Well, you told her.”  Nick ceased struggling and went limp in shock.  “She told me herself, when she came back to Zootopia after accidentally turning the city against predators and leaving in shame, she was looking for you.  She found me and asked where to find you, I asked her why she was wasting time with you instead of going straight to the cops with what she’d discovered. That’s when she told me about you telling her your deepest darkest secret and how she needed to apologize for betraying your trust in her.  Then when I directed her to the bridge you were living under you had a big hug and cry and brought down Bellwether. A few months later some of us were starting a pool on when or which one of you would pop the question.”

 

Nick could not believe his auditory sensors.  It was ridiculous, him, the hustler from childhood, opening up to a bunny cop?  But, he did know that he joined the ZPD to be her partner on the force after meeting her, even if he couldn’t say why.  “I… I don’t know what to say.”

 

“Well then, let’s have those coordinates and go get her so you two can catch up on lost time then.”  Finnick held Nick up to the port on his neck and after the slightest hesitation the formerly bigger fox led a cable into it.

\---

The newly disturbed topsoil quivered, swelled upward, and burst to reveal a vac-suited bunny trembling in exhaustion at her effort.  Judy threw herself out of the hole she’d dug in the new hillside and collapsed onto the surface, willing herself to breathe normally.  When she was sure her heart wasn’t going to explode she looked around. It was night now, the sun was gone and the stars and moons were out.  Part of her thought it would be a good idea to go back into her hole and wait for morning, but her suit’s maker had barely more than enough power to recycle her wastes into usable air, water, and carbohydrates for another 40 hours, and she didn’t want to waste any of that limited time sleeping.

 

Staring up at the night sky of Mares she wished she had taken the time to learn the constellations of mammalkind’s new homeworld, then she might be able to navigate her way out.  Recognizing a potential lifeline she spoke to her muse. [Skye, any chance you have a Mareisian starchart downloaded?]

 

[Yes, as a matter of fact I do.] The AI answered in a moment.  [It was part of the Mares Ranger survival package they sent to everyone on rotation.  I might even be able to discern our present location given a few minutes.]

 

[Oh good,] Judy sighed audibly in relief.  [Anything you need me to do?]

 

[It might help if we had a higher vantage point.  Can you climb that dune over there?]

 

[Of course.] The rabbit replied.  She scrambled up the crest of loose dirt and sand, losing her footing a couple of times, but accelerated reflexes keeping her from tumbling back down to the base of the dune.  She looked up, surveying the vast landscape of the TITAN Quarantine Zone from up high, staring into the stars as the AI in her head attempted to form patterns from the distant points of light, the light now steaming into her eyes from some of them produced before the Cornucopia-Makers ventured out from their own homeworld, wherever that might be.

 

[All right, I think the nearest edge of the TQZ is 30 kilometers in this direction.]  An augmented reality arrow pointed off into the far distance. [You should be able to reach it in six hours, but there’s no guarantee you’ll meet anyone who can help you report back in.]

 

[The sooner we’re out of here, the better.]  Judy started to climb down the duneside carefully in the direction indicated by her AR.  Glancing off to one side her eye happened to catch a dark silhouette off in the distance.  It was too dark to discern any fine details, but they appeared to be some manner of tall, long-limbed mammal.  [Who would be all the way out here?]

 

[Probably one of those thrill-seekers or TITAN scavengers we were warned about.]  Skye answered. [I believe the local term for them is “Zone Stalker”.]

 

[Well, if they have a ride out of here I might let things slide.]  She started off running in the figure’s direction, calling through her suit’s speakers.  “Hello? I’m a little lost here, if you have a buggy or something that can get me to the…”

 

As the silhouette turned in response to Judy’s calls she caught sight of the figure’s face, or what passed for one at least.  In sharp contrast to the figure’s dark skin it was wearing a stark white mask in a crude caricature of a horse’s face, with two large empty holes where eyes should be and only a narrow slit for a mouth.  Even before it began its piercing wail Judy knew that it was no creature that had any business existing in this world.

 

Judy slowed, the horror before her restricting her legs.  In desperation she started to turn back in the direction from which she’d come.  Only to see another silhouette, this one wearing a wolf mask, waiting for her.

 

To the sides more figures were coming into view.  All around her the monsters were closing in, there was nowhere to run.  Thinking she might burrow again she crouched down to tear at the topsoil and brought away two handfuls before her arm exploded in agony.  Judy fell onto her other side and quickly examined her wounded limb, gasping in shock at the diamond-edged flechettes protruding from her bleeding vac-suit.  The reason why became apparent as the creatures came closer, one of them grasping a smoking shredder gun.

\---

[Scat!]  Nick sent his one-word message over the emergency laser line he and Finnick shared.  [She’s alive, but a pack of Exsurgents found her.]

 

[Exsurgents?]  Finnick responded, yanking a railgun sniper rifle off his back as he galloped up to meet with the Dragonfly.  [You sure? What type?]

 

[Black skin, white masks.]  The other fox relayed. [I count at least five of them.  That enough intel for you?]

 

[Wastewalkers.]  The Synthtaur identified as he crested the ridge, rearing up on his hind legs and rapidly reconfiguring the front pair into a second set of arms.  [With any luck they’re just hungry.]

 

Nick began streaming the feed from his visual sensors to the fennec taur, who was bracing one lower arm against a rock and unholstering an SMG with the other.  [Why? What would be worse than eating her?]

 

[They could be looking to turn her.] Finnick explained, drawing a bead on the nearest Wastewalker with his rifle.  [Those masks aren’t just decoration, they carry the nanovirus. Don’t even touch them.]

\---

Judy laid there, bleeding and twitching in terror, as the monsters closed in on her.  A meter from her resting place they stopped, forming a circle of gangly giants around the fallen bunny.  Now that they came close she could see that their skin was hairless and smooth, like black plastic, and their seemingly featureless fingers and elbows ended in long claws.  One of the creatures cupped its hands in front of its ivory face and it seemed like a fountain of milky tears poured out of the gaping holes it had for eyes and into its palms.  The fluid hardened, curled in on itself and in seconds a replica of the creature’s own mask lay in its hands. It held its work up to show Judy and she let out a shrill scream of horrified realization as she recognized the species of the new mask.  It was a bunny.

\---

[No!]  Nick shouted as he zoomed in on the mask in the Wastewalker alpha’s hands.

 

Finnick’s rifle cracked and sparked as a supersonic slug sped from the end of the barrel into the back of the closest Exsurgent.  It staggered, but remained standing as it turned to face the one who had shot it. A second shot caught it in the middle of its mask, causing it to collapse.  [Nick, I don’t think I can kill them all in time.]

 

[You have to Finn.  If she meant as much to me as you say she did, I can’t lose her now.  Not when I was so…] he trailed off, the death of the one Wastewalker left an opening in the circle that exposed the terrified bunny.  [Finnick, shoot her!]

 

The Synthtaur stared up in the Dragonfly’s general direction.  [What? Are you sure?]

 

[It’s the only way to save her.  Do it! Please.]

 

Finnick drew his rifle back up, lining up a shot that would pass straight through the bunny’s chest.

\---

_ A bullet at twice the speed of sound plunged straight through Judy’s lungs and heart, reducing them to a bloody pulp. _

 

In the split second before the bullet impacted, Judy shifted so that the tungsten-carbide projectile passed through her skull instead.  Her dying breath sounded like a sigh of relief.

\---

Finnick unloaded his rifle’s magazine into the remaining Wastewalkers, killing two more and sending the remainder running.  Once Nick was certain there were no active threats in the area he slowly descended onto the remains of the first rabbit Fury.  He grasped her head in his feelers, praying to whatever benign gods this insane world might allow that she could be salvaged. If he had lungs he would have let out a sigh of relief when he found that the exit wound was far above where her cortical stack was secreted away.  He would have to thank Finnick later for the clean shot straight between her eyes, he decided.

 

Turning her head back around Nick flicked out the smartmatter utilitool affixed to one of his forelegs and began to cut into the top of her spinal column with its shapeshifting blade.  Behind her cervical vertebrae he found his prize, a diamondoid cylinder barely bigger than a blueberry, upon which her Ego was saved.

 

Securing the bloody implant in a compartment on his insectoid torso, he flew off towards Finnick again as the robotic fennec-taur was preparing a thermobaric grenade.  Without a word, he tossed it into the center of the ring of corpses he’d created. The detonation incinerated Exsurgent and mammal alike, leaving no sign that they had ever lain there.

 

Finnick turned as Nick landed on him again.  “You salvaged it?’ Nick took the stack out and showed it to his friend.  “Planning to pursue a second career as a Headhunter?” Finnick joked.

 

Indignantly, Nick leapt off of the Synthtaur and flew off in the direction of the pick-up point.  Leaving Finnick behind.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And now, the conclusion.

Judy’s eyes slowly twitched open to the sound of somebody moaning “Ommmm” repeatedly.  With a moment’s searching she found the source of the heavy breathing, a shaggy-headed yak sitting cross-legged in the middle of a patch of grass, on the ceiling.  Surprised, the bunny doe looked around for a possible explanation.

 

The walls around the yak were upholstered, with loose straps or handles every few feet.  Turning to try and view her immediate surroundings, she was shocked to discover that she was strapped to some manner of cot that lay bolted to the floor, or ceiling, whatever the surface opposite the other mammal was.  And she noticed one other thing as well.

 

“Why am I naked?!”  Judy exclaimed, tugging at her bindings in sudden terror.

 

At her shout the yak shook himself out of his trance, looseing a cloud of dust that hung suspended in the air around his head.  Slowly, he drifted up from the bed of grass and grabbed onto one of the straps in the walls. As he slowly rotated in the air it became apparent that he was just as unclothed as Judy herself.  Stopping himself with an outstretched hoof he faced the bunny and told her, “whoa, calm down there little bunny. Those are just to stop you drifting away into an air vent while you were asleep.”

 

Judy temporarily ceased struggling as she realized what the floating and bed with straps meant.  “We’re in space?” She asked, almost rhetorically.

 

“Oh, we’re all in space.”  He replied, starting to unfasten one of the straps around Judy’s waist.  “No matter what planet or habitat we’re on, we’re all floating around in a tiny island in the unknowable ocean of space.”

 

The instant her arm was free Judy snapped open the remaining clasps and pushed herself off the bed.  In the micro-gravity that was enough force to send her careening into the grass-covered surface on the opposite side of the room.  Feeling herself start to bounce back off she quickly grabbed two handfuls of grass and hung on. “I meant,” she said as soon as she’d caught her breath.  “That we’re not on a planet or moon with appreciable gravity.”

 

“Oh, right.”  The yak pondered as he sprung back to the grassy wall.  “Yeah, we’re on the Vermin barge  _ Inconveniently Tied _ .”  He glanced over at the bunny still sprawled on the flora.  “Hey, just so you know, Carnivale grass is mildly hallucinogenic.  Gives you a good time but I wouldn’t eat it if you were planning on going anywhere in the next twelve hours.”

 

Judy spat out a couple blades that had drifted into her mouth.  Quickly she searched for the nearest wall’s closest strap and leapt for it.  She caught it and just barely managed to hang on as she bounced off the upholstery.  “Okay then, now that that’s been established.” She continued. “Why, am, I,  _ naked _ !”

 

The yak twisted around back into his cross-legged position.  This time Judy was close enough to notice his feet digging around in the alien “grass” until they found a pair of bars hanging just above the ground that his hooves, which apparently had the same secondary digits that enabled him to grasp objects with his forehooves, could latch onto.  “It’s easier to read your aura without clothes in the way. I mean, animals wearing clothes, that’s just not natural.”

 

“You sound familiar,” Judy thought out loud.  “Did we happen to meet at a naturalist club in Old Zootopia back in 116?  Twenty-four years before the Fall I mean?”

 

“Don’t know if I can remember that far back, but you do look a bit like that bunny who came into Mystic Springs Oasis on March 7th, 116 at 1:43 pm.  But, that bunny wasn’t Awakened. Did that happen in your next life?”

 

Judy, both relieved at the familiarity with this mammal and exasperated with his crazy ideas, found herself oddly curious.  “Dare I ask what you mean by ‘awakened’?”

 

Yax looked oddly surprised at her question.  “You know, you’ve got the second senses, you’re in touch with the astral plane, psychic…”

 

“Psychic?”  Judy interjected, “that’s ridiculous.  There’s no such thing as…” she stopped as memories of unexpected precognition and mental probing resurfaced.

 

“Sure there is.  More than there used to be even.”  Yax continued. “I think the telepathic screams of all those mammals who died in the Fall created an astral rift that opened a lot of third eyes.  Or ears, or nostrils I guess.”

 

The bunny, looking for a rational explanation, interjected again.  “Look, a few times I saw flashes of events that might happen seconds before they occurred.  But, I’m pretty sure that was just my neurachem.”

 

[Neurachem doesn’t do that Judy.]  The voice in the bunny’s head interrupted.   [I have all the specs and considering your performance in your last sleeve you were reacting a little too quickly to those attacks for implants alone to explain it.]

 

[Skye!] Judy mentally shouted back.  She’d been starting to wonder if her captors had taken her muse away from her.   [Can you tell what happened?]

 

[All I can tell you is that someone apparently found your cortical stack and farcast us to a Vermin Swarm to be re-sleeved.]  The AI replied.   [And whoever it was went to the trouble of finding you a sleeve very similar to your birth one.  The data I can access suggests a Splicer instead of a Flat but aside from the genefixing the physical parameters match with your first body to an almost obsessive degree.]

 

Judy stretched out an arm to examine it.  Her new fur was the exact same color as the fur she’d had for over 40 years, there was no stiffness of bioweave nor tingle of neurachem.  At first, she thought her arm was a bit too short, but, as she thought about it, that wasn’t quite right. For the past three months her limbs had been too long, now they were the right length again.  Who would go to so much effort to make her comfortable in her new skin? “Yax,” she inquired, “who asked you to take a look at my aura or whatever you were doing?”

 

“Your friend, Robin Hoodlum.”  At the bunny’s confounded expression he started to elaborate.  “You know, your friend who was with you when you came to Mystic Springs.  He was a red fox in his early thirties, wearing a green floral-print shirt…”

 

“Nick!”  She cut him off.  “Do you know where he is now?”

 

“I think I last saw him going down hall 3, most likely towards the EVA hangers.  Huh?” Without warning, he cocked his head sharply to the other side and said into the open air, “no, I don’t see any bad spirits on her, just her own spirit extending into the other world.  Oh, sure, I’ll tell her.” Turning back towards Judy Yax said. “Now he’s on the Starsight deck in the Roller.”

 

She looked at him skeptically.  “Who were you just talking to?”

 

Yax shrugged.  “Don’t know, just some guy watching my XP feed.  Forgot I had that on.”

 

Abruptly feeling much more self-conscious again, Judy quickly attempted to cover herself with her free hand and feet.  “Oookay, I don’t suppose you might happen to have some clothes here I could borrow?” Towards Skye she thought  [Starlight in the Roller, can you find that?]

 

[Yes, the mesh here is surprisingly open.  Starlight is an observation platform in the main habitation cylinder.  It’s spun for .5G so you shouldn’t have much trouble getting around in there.]

 

“Hmm, there might be some Vac-suits in the closet over there in your size.”  Yax swung open a small hatch set into the wall and selected a tube the size of a thick pen.  “Yeah, this one looks like it should fit.” He said, tossing the tube to Judy.

 

Catching it with ease, Judy opened the tube and drew out a roll of thin canvas rolled around a tiny gas cylinder on a filmy belt.  Unrolling and unfolding the belt revealed that it was a light jumpsuit with a hood. She somehow doubted that it would keep her alive very long in open space, but she supposed it would serve as clothing.

 

The bunny had just slipped into the baggy jumpsuit and was looking for a way to fasten it closed when she noticed a new icon in her entoptic display.   [Sky, is that what I think it is?]

 

[It does indeed appear that this suit is made of smartfabric.  Is there a specific style you have in mind?]

 

Judy considered for a moment, then decided to trust her muse’s judgement.   [Whatever you suggest.]

 

The seam closed on its own, the hood retracted into a collar, and the material writhed as it shrunk to fit its wearer perfectly.  When the process was complete Judy found herself wearing a light-and-dark-blue one-piece with padding concentrated over the knees, forearms, and ribcage.  She was momentarily disappointed at the lack of a badge, but shrugged it off and sprang for the main hatch.

\---

After bounding and crawling through what seemed like kilometers of weightless corridors Judy finally found herself in the cylinder.  In the final hallway she began to feel herself drawn down towards a specific surface. Centripetal force acting in an approximation of gravity.  Cautiously, she climbed down from her handhold on the wall and with some trepidation set first one paw and then the other upon the floor. She still felt light on her feet, but she could stand without drifting away.  Careful not to accidentally spring off the floor, she stepped lightly towards the hatch at the end of the corridor.

 

Looking out into the Roller from the hatch she thought it looked like a compact city.  In between the atmosphere recyclers, crew dorms, and hydroponics farms she expected from diagrams of colony ships, there were what appeared to be stores.  In both open-air booths and small prefab enclosures she could see vendors offering what seemed like every conceivable product or service ever sold; exotic clothes, weapons, sex, drugs, mammal organs in culture vats (oddly close to the food stalls), and even whole sleeves.  Eventually, her gaze settled on what looked like nothing so much as a hole in the gentling rolling deck. 

 

Skye highlighted it in AR,  [that’s the Starsight deck.]  She confirmed, she also noted several silhouettes on the patch of star-spotted open space that may have been mammals walking on nothing.   [It’s 20-centimeter thick transparent aluminum.]

 

Circling the aperture where Judy crouched she found a series of raised concentric circles radiating out to the sides of the massive drum.  Testing the nearest ring and finding it satisfactorily sturdy, Judy grabbed on and swung out into the vast open space. She used the rings as a ladder to descend outwards to the deck below, feeling spin-emulated gravity tug gradually stronger on her as she came closer to the deck.  She also heard the calls of the vendors on her approach.

 

“Now you call that a vac-suit? Check these ones I’ve got here.”

 

“Need medichines?  Tetrachromic vision?  Some skillware to learn how to move properly in zero-g?”

“Hey bunny, how’d you like a real predator and prey experience?”

 

The bewildered and overwhelmed bunny scurried rapidly through the crowds trying to ignore the merchants and their wares in varying levels of taboo.  It was like the bazaar that appeared in Sahara Square once a year, on steroids. What made it worse was that it was obvious they were focusing on her, mammals who were clearly permanent residents of the ship were spared the sales pitches and the calls picked up and died down only as she passed by.  After what seemed like an eternity of bright and shiny merchandize Judy made it to the metallic crystal floor.

 

Scanning the loose crowd of mammals walking across the Starlight deck, staring down into the endless void, lying prone with their faces pressed against the giant gemstone floor, or making out with multiple different partners; Judy spotted a red fox lying back in a lawn chair.

 

He wasn’t quite the same as he’d been on that day over 30 years ago.  His shirt had been replaced with a smartfabric suit projecting an animated pattern of falling flowers, his fur was interrupted in places by the seams characteristic of Pod assembly, and the eyes that turned to face her when she called out “Nick?” had the glint of cybereyes.  But she would have recognized that expression anywhere.

 

“Nick!”  She exclaimed again, dashing over to his side.  “Is it really you? What happened?”

 

Nick didn’t answer.  He attempted to maintain an air of stoicism but the subtle signs of sorrow and regret were clear as day to her.  Before she could say anything else he held out the end of a fiber-optic cable. Confused, Judy followed the cord up to its other end, finding it lodged in the back of his neck.

 

Judy rubbed at the back of her own neck and was shocked to find that a flap of her nape peeled away.  Beneath lay a panel of smooth stainless steel with a datajack in the center. Starting to understand she took the cable, and seeing the look of anxiety and anticipation growing upon his face, carefully inserted it.

 

[We can talk more privately this way.]   Nick’s voice resounded in her mesh inserts as soon as she jacked in.   [Honestly, I wasn’t sure you would come.]

 

[Nick, why wouldn’t I come?  We’ve been partners for thirty years.]

 

[Well, for one thing I shot you pretty recently, twice.]

 

[The sniper was you?]

 

[No, that was Finnick, I was spotting for him and insisted he take the shot though.]

[I can understand that time, remind me to thank him actually.  But what happened the first time? Why stalk me instead of just talking to me?]

 

[I was under orders not to contact you if it could be helped.  Observe and report only until further instructions. As for why I shot you, well, what did Yax tell you?]

 

[Yax?  He seemed to think I was a psychic or something.  Are you saying he was right?]

 

[Yax doesn’t know anything, he’s coped with his infection by wrapping it in all kinds of NuAge pseudo-mysticism.  But he can sense an infection in others and can tell the difference between Wools-MacLion and the really bad strains.]

 

[Infection?  What are you talking about?  Wait, does this have something to do with “Exsurgent”?]

 

[We call it the Exsurgent virus, it was unleashed by the TITANs during the Fall.  Sometimes it takes a digital form, sometimes as bio-nanites, occasionally a series of sensory inputs that causes parts of the brain to rewrite itself which we call a “Basilisk hack”.]

 

[And you think I was infected with it?]

 

[Carrots, I can believe that you figured out who I was just from kinesics, but I never told you the word “Exsurgent” before the last 30 seconds and my firewalls didn’t pick up any brain hacking.]

 

Judy fell trembling to the crystalline floor as she digested the information Nick had just given her.   [Nick, are you actually telling me that I was infected with some sort of TITAN bioweapon and now I can read minds?]

 

[We call that a psi-gamma sleight.  Wools-MacLion and Haunting strain infectees develop that talent at the three-month mark.  Though sometimes Wools-MacLion, the one we’re fairly certain you’ve got, stops at the psi-chi level.  Psi-chi sleights tend to involve amplified savant abilities like photographic memory, instinctive understanding of new devices or languages, or quantum-level predictive mapping.]

 

[And, if I have this Haunting strain?]

 

[If you have the Haunting strain of the Exsurgent virus your brain will be fully subverted by a TITAN program in another three months.  But, that version of the virus also gives you hallucinations and horrible nightmares. You should be fine if you don’t have those, relatively speaking.]

 

[No!  I mean, sometimes I have visions, but they always come to pass a split second later.  Like, I knew you were going to draw your gun and shoot me in the heart so I ducked. It might be that prediction psi-chi you mentioned.]

 

[Yeah, sorry about that.  I didn’t have any way to tell whether you had Wools-MacLion or one of the nastier strains and I panicked.  But I’ve been cleared for enough of the information we have on the Exsurgent virus now.]

 

Judy reached out for the armrest of Nick’s chair, pulling herself up and leaning him towards her.  Meeting him eye-to-eye she made her ultimatum,  [okay, you keep saying “we” in a way that makes it sound like you’ve become some kind of spy.  Are you going to explain that, or am I going to need to use my new powers to pry it from your mind?]   She raised her other hand over his head threateningly.

 

The fox looked worried for a moment, then relaxed and rolled his electronic eyes in amusement.   [You can try, but psi doesn’t work too well on cyberbrains for some reason.  And there’s a team of snipers waiting for my distress signal, ready to cauterize the area if need be.]   A red laser dot appeared on the bunny’s chest for a couple seconds, and she lowered her arm.   [But, as it so happens, we were hoping to recruit you so I might as well give you the bullet points.]

 

Nick leaned back again and began to tell his story.   [Three days before the Fall, I made an Ego backup with my non-department provider.  Sometime during the chaos after the Fall the company’s backup caches came into the possession of Nine Lives, you know them right?]

 

[Yes Nick, we raided their body bank in Tundratown together.  Hundreds of vegetative mammals with their Egoes farcast to work camps in the outer system or virtual brothels.  Your second biomorph was a teenager whose Ego we never recovered but whose body was in the bank.]

 

[What, really?  No wonder they hated me so much.  They made me star in more torture porn flicks than I can remember, most of them fatal, and then leased me out to other organized crime bosses for more “creative” torments.  It was so horrific that I had as much of my memory of those three years with them erased as possible.]   Judy perked up slightly, recalling the memory she’d glimpsed in his psyche, and the ones she’d been unable to find.   [Anyways, one day I was set to fight this, thing, in a gladiatorial arena.  I’ll send you a picture here.]

 

An image appeared in the bunny’s entoptics.  It showed a cage containing a horrendous creature out of the worst nightmares of a dozen schlocky horror writers.  It skittered on a set of crab-like stalks and it’s body was a trunk-like bundle of several purple rods. But the most notable part were the tentacles, long, ropy, waving in the air like a twisted crown with two of them ending in vicious barbs.

 

[Fortunately, one of the spectators pulled out a seeker pistol and blew the thing to Niflheim before either of us were released from our cages.  Then her friends started blowing away everyone else with the rest of their concealed armory. Since I’d been sleeved in just a basic pod wearing a loincloth they correctly figured that I was an innocent victim and were moderately civil during the interrogation that followed.  Apparently, my latest renter had been experimenting with some TITAN artifacts and that had drawn the attention of Firewall.]

 

[Firewall?]  Judy interrupted.   [Who is that?  Are they some kind of government agency?]

 

[Oh hell no.]  Nick replied.   [Firewall, as I soon discovered, is a non-governmental cell-structured organization with the singular objective of ensuring that transmammalkind survives.  If anyone’s government agents it was probably those guys who tried to kidnap you down in the tunnels.]

 

[Cell-structured.]  Judy thought.   [I think I remember something about that form of organization.  It means you’re grouped into cells that have minimal contact with one another so that no one can reveal the identities of the whole group.  Wasn’t it most common with terrorists and criminal conspiracies?]

 

The fox chuckled audibly.   [The Species Consortium has probably labeled us terrorists, or at least the parts of it that know about us.  And I will admit, we have done questionable things in pursuit of our mission. But, we are doing good here. It’s an uphill struggle, but we’ve saved thousands, possibly millions of lives.]

 

[I think you might need to explain that a little better.]

 

[Carrots, you were backed up during the Fall, you’ve been to the TQZ, you know what the TITANs built.  Sometimes those things escape the quarantine, sometimes somebody stumbles across a derelict habitat infested with Exsurgents and gets infected, there’s even some mammals who go looking for TITAN-tech to sell to the highest bidder.]

 

[What?!  Why would anybody want to buy that stuff?]

 

[Terrorists who want superweapons, cults worshipping the TITANs, Singularity-seeking Exmammals unhindered by weaknesses like “morality”, even some hypercorps desperate for an edge over their competition.  There’s also been reports of Project Ozma, our “competitors” in the Consortium, weaponizing Basilisk hacks and a few other Exsurgent variants.]

 

[So, when these TITAN weapons and monsters are let loose you do what?  Deal with them and the ones who loosed them?]

 

[Most modern governments aren’t held to the same level of accountability that Zootopia’s was.  If a police chief in the Inner System attempted to arrest the mayor they worked for they’d quickly find themselves and their entire precinct without jobs and blackballed.  You do know that the Consortium is privately owned just like the corporations that govern it, don’t you?]   At Judy’s silence he continued.   [Anyways, since we can’t rely on the “legitimate” authorities to handle mammals who play with the second end of the world, we have to deal with them.  If they’re Exsurgents we can sometimes recover a pre-infection backup though. And anyways, we don’t just go after TITAN scat, there’s plenty of other ways to destroy mammalkind and we keep watch on them all.  Exmammals preying on the defenseless, mad scientists experimenting with new Seed AIs, nobody knows what the Factors are up to but aliens or no I smell a long con...]

 

[Wait, did you just say aliens?]

 

[Haven’t kept up on the news lately?  The Factors first showed up a couple years after the Fall, like giant slime molds that can pilot starships.  Now they come by some habitat every so often to trade curiosities from what they claim are other worlds of some sort of interstellar confederation.  We also found what people are calling “Pandara Gates”, no idea who built them but they open wormholes to other gates in a ton of other systems. For some reason though, we haven’t met any other sapient aliens, just a lot of non-sapient critters and some ruins of civilizations that died out ten thousand years ago.]

 

Visions of an endless void and grasping tendrils flowing up her arms dashed across Judy’s vision as she attempted to process this information.   [Skye, is this true?]

 

[Yes Judy.  Exosolar life is now a fact of life.  I thought you were under enough culture shock already so I’m sorry to say I neglected to inform you of them.]

 

[Hello, who’s this?]

 

[Skye, my muse.  Remember?]

 

[His memory’s not what it used to be.]

 

[Oh hi Jack, I was wondering when you’d show up.  Why don’t you and Skye catch up while me and Nick finish our conversation?]

 

The fox’s hand slowly swept back towards the cable in his neck, but Judy moved to stop him, gently.   [I don’t need to read your mind to know you’re scared to ask me something, but you also need to.  Please.]

 

Nick put his hand down, out of her grasp, and laid back again.  After almost a full minute of silence he spoke again.  [Carrots, Judy.   How close were we?  Really?]

 

Judy slumped to the floor next to his chair, turning away from him to gaze with one eye into the starry void she began to formulate an answer.   [We were more than friends, sometimes lovers, always close as brother and sister.  I don’t know if there’s a better way to describe us. With departmental regulations and the risk of PR scandals we were hesitant to take things too far, but there were a few times we both had too much to drink and woke up with one or both of us feeling sore.  After a decade together I was starting to think we might make it official, but then you died.]  She paused, turning back to him.   [Do you remember that?  The first time you died?]

 

[Vaguely.  The parts I remember most clearly are climbing up onto a car in Sahara Square, a sharp pain in the side of my head, and then the startup sequence for that robo-fox I wore for a while after.]

 

[You didn’t take it well.  This was still in the early days of brain uploading and the psychologists weren’t sure how to treat resleeve-induced alienation and dysmorphia.  It took years of therapy before you were comfortable enough in your metal skin to try being intimate with someone again.]  Judy paused, her own misgivings rising to the surface.   [And I, I admit I had some trouble believing you were the same fox I’d loved and not just some robotic copy.  We thought that things might improve for the both of us when you got that biomorph from the Nine Lives warehouse, what with you having fur again.  But, instead you started to feel guilty about wearing somebody else’s face, even after his parents gave their permission for you to use the sleeve until his Ego was rescued.  The Fall happened before we had the chance to get together again and you…]

 

[Stop.]  Nick held his hand up, one finger on the cord.  [I don’t need to know how the TITANs killed me. All I know is that my stack was irrecoverable and I’m grateful for that.]  Something made him start to think though.  [Strange, sounds like I had trouble resleeving before.  Now I have barely any problem integrating to a new sleeve.  Heck, my codename is based on a mythical shapeshifter.]

 

[Nick,] Judy cautiously laid a hand on the fox’s shoulder, careful not to make skin contact.   [You’ve been through things I can only begin to imagine.  While I hadn’t even resleeved for farcasting until three months ago, from my perspective.  We may have changed, not only our bodies but our minds too, and the world may have gone mad, but I don’t want to be separated from you again.]

 

Nick stared into her deep purple eyes with his electronic green ones.  Then, slowly, he reached over and drew her in for a tight hug.  [Does that mean you agree to join?  It’s okay if you don’t, me and your backup could just get an igloo on Tarand after I kill you.]

 

The bunny’s eyes and ears perked up in shock, then she remembered the snipers and started considering what immortality might mean for operational security.   [That won’t be necessary.  I’ll join your benevolent conspiracy here.  Wouldn’t want to waste this nice new sleeve anyways.]

 

[Like it?  It’s a limited edition Judith Laverne Hopps Heirloom morph based on a best guess reconstruction of your genome.  One of the “Julius” variants that didn’t sell too well so I picked it up for a steal.]

 

[Julius?]

 

[Nothing twelve hours in a vat was unable to fix.  Though, if you wanted to try something different it’s not that difficult to change back.]

 

Judy couldn’t help herself from laughing out loud.  This strange new world still had some surprises in store for her it seemed.


End file.
